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Hours after the Bureau of Labor Statistics released employment data showing slow job growth for July and prior months, President Donald Trump fired the BLS commissioner, claiming the job numbers were “phony” and that the commissioner had “faked” other job figures to help Democrats. There’s no evidence the commissioner, or others at BLS, manipulated the data, and Trump hasn’t provided any.
The president’s timeline on past BLS announcements supposedly attempting to aid Democrats in the 2024 election is also incorrect.
Trump’s claims echo his past baseless assertions that the Biden administration had manipulated data on jobs. Last August, he claimed an annual revision of BLS figures was a “total lie.”
Kathy Utgoff, a former BLS commissioner who was appointed by President George W. Bush, told us in a phone interview that commissioners “can’t rig the numbers. … The commissioner has no ability to change the numbers that come out of computers at the last minute.” BLS staffers “hand the commissioner the press release with the numbers in it” 36 hours before the jobs report is announced.
Utgoff told us that the only thing the commissioner could do is adjust the wording in the press release, and the goal is to “try to be boring” with that language.
William Beach, another former BLS commissioner, who was appointed by Trump in 2019, described the process the same way in an interview on CNN’s “State of the Union.”
“By the time the commissioner sees the numbers, they’re all prepared. They’re locked into the computer system,” he said in the Aug. 3 interview.
BLS produces statistical data on employment, wages, inflation and more, and its work has long been viewed as nonpartisan. “The rank and file of the BLS and the other statistical agencies are deeply imbued with the importance of independence,” David Wilcox, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics and director of U.S. economic research at Bloomberg Economics, told us in an email. “They understand to their core the importance of delivering the best possible estimates, even if and when the message is inconvenient for the president and his team.”
BLS’ press releases are dry. The Aug. 1 press release, issued at 8:30 a.m., stated: “Total nonfarm payroll employment changed little in July (+73,000) and has shown little change since April, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reported today. The unemployment rate, at 4.2 percent, also changed little in July.”
At the bottom of the release, BLS noted sizable revisions for the prior two months. “Revisions for May and June were larger than normal. The change in total nonfarm payroll employment for May was revised down by 125,000, from +144,000 to +19,000, and the change for June was revised down by 133,000, from +147,000 to +14,000. With these revisions, employment in May and June combined is 258,000 lower than previously reported. (Monthly revisions result from additional reports received from businesses and government agencies since the last published estimates and from the recalculation of seasonal factors.)”
The employment data now show the economy has added 486,000 jobs during Trump’s second term, a growth rate of 0.3%. Over the same time period last year, the U.S. added 954,000 jobs, or 0.6%.
The monthly job estimates typically are released the first Friday of each month, based on what’s called the “establishment survey,” a survey of about 121,000 employers that covers about 30% of U.S. employment.
After the BLS report was released, Stephen Miran, chair of the White House’s Council of Economic Advisers, gave a few reasons for the employment data. He told reporters that “about 60% of the overall revisions were due to quirks of the seasonal adjustment process, changes to seasonal adjustments,” saying that teachers, for example, factor into those seasonal calculations. Miran also said there was uncertainty about tariffs and the Republican tax bill that could have caused some firms to “hold off” on investments. “That’s totally reasonable and absolutely something that you would expect,” he said, adding that the “uncertainty is resolved” so “we expect things to get materially stronger.”
But after Miran’s comments, in a 2:09 p.m. Truth Social post, Trump announced that BLS Commissioner Erika McEntarfer would be fired immediately. The president claimed McEntarfer “faked the Jobs Numbers before the Election to try and boost Kamala’s chances of Victory,” and he questioned the most recent job figures.
He pointed out that McEntarfer was appointed by Biden. McEntarfer, an economist who worked in the federal government for more than 20 years, was confirmed for a four-year term on Jan. 11, 2024, by an 86-8 bipartisan Senate vote. Among those who voted to approve her were now Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
In remarks to reporters on Aug. 1, Trump said he fired McEntarfer because “I think her numbers were wrong,” calling the BLS job statistics released that day “phony.” In a subsequent Truth Social post, Trump claimed that the latest jobs report and pre-election figures were all “Rigged.”
The administration hasn’t produced any evidence for Trump’s claims. The White House has pointed to revisions that BLS has made to job numbers under McEntarfer’s leadership. But that’s not evidence of any manipulation.
“Revisions are not mistakes, they are improvements,” Utgoff said.
The BLS routinely revises its figures as more information is gathered, the agency explains on its website. The monthly job estimates are revised twice as more payroll data are collected, and then a full year’s worth of figures are updated in what BLS calls its annual “benchmarking” process.
While noting that the revisions to May and June job figures were “big,” Beach, on CNN, said that “every time we publish on Friday, there are revisions to the previous two months. This is a survey. And a survey has sample returns.”
Similarly, Wilcox told us that the revisions “are indeed larger than normal. The fact that that happened is a vivid reminder that the monthly estimates are just that — estimates. They are grounded in state-of-the-art statistical practices built up over decades, but they are not revelations of truth.”
Wilcox was the chair of the Federal Economic Statistics Advisory Committee, a group of independent experts who advise government statistical agencies, until February, when the committee was terminated by the commerce secretary. Wilcox objected to the Trump administration’s 2026 budget proposal, which aims to reduce funding to BLS. He told us: “To reduce the odds of revisions of this size happening in the future, we need to be investing in the capabilities of the statistical agencies rather than proposing an 8% cut in the BLS’s budget, as the administration has done for FY2026.”
(The administration’s 2026 budget request also “proposes to reorganize the BLS, the Census Bureau, and the Bureau of Economic Analysis into a single statistical agency at the Department of Commerce.”)
Trump’s Election/BLS Timeline Is Wrong
In his Aug. 1 remarks to reporters, Trump offered an inaccurate description of job figures released before the election. “Days before the election, she [McEntarfer] came out with these beautiful numbers for Kamala, I guess Biden/Kamala. And she came out with these beautiful numbers trying to get somebody else elected,” Trump said. “And then on the 15th of November or thereabouts, they had an 8 or 900,000 overstatement, reduction. Right after the election.”
Trump said that McEntarfer “said she made a mistake.”
That’s not what happened.
A month before the election, the BLS jobs announcement, on Oct. 4, showed growth of 254,000 jobs for September. But “days before the election,” as Trump put it, the BLS announcement on Nov. 1 showed weak growth of 12,000 jobs in October.
The press release noted that strike activity had led to a loss of jobs, and hurricanes that hit the country also may have had an effect on estimates in some industries. BLS also said the August and September figures were revised downward by 112,000. A Fox News headline called the report “dismal” and said it “gives Trump last-minute political ammunition to fire at Harris.” The Trump campaign at the time said the jobs report was “a catastrophe” that showed how Harris “broke our economy.”
A month after the election, the October figure was revised upward.
As for Trump’s reference to an 800,000 or 900,000 reduction, in late August 2024 — well before the election — BLS announced a preliminary estimate that the number of jobs created over the 12 months ending in March 2024 would be adjusted downward by 818,000.
The preliminary revision figure, which was larger than the average revision over the prior 10 years, was part of BLS’ annual “benchmarking” process. As we said, the establishment survey of employers is used to produce the monthly employment estimates. Later, each year, BLS adjusts its figures using state unemployment insurance tax filings from employers, more comprehensive information that takes longer to gather and covers about 97% of U.S. nonfarm employment.
At the time, Trump claimed the revision was a “lie” and that “the Harris/Biden administration has been caught fraudulently manipulating job statistics.” There was no evidence for such claims, as we wrote.
As we wrote then, while the revision would be sizable, there have been other large revisions in the past. The annual revision for 2019, under Trump, was a reduction of 514,000 jobs, or -0.3% of the initial March 2019 employment estimate. The 2009 revision was a reduction of 902,000, or -0.7% of the original March 2009 estimate.
On NBC News’ “Meet the Press” on Aug. 3, Kevin Hassett, the director of the White House’s National Economic Council, also raised questions about the 818,000 preliminary revision estimate when asked for evidence that the BLS figures were “rigged.” Hassett said that large revision “making the Joe Biden job record a lot worse … came out after he withdrew from the presidential campaign. There have been a bunch of patterns that could make people wonder.”
But the BLS announced that preliminary benchmarking estimate in late August, around the time it had done so in past years.
The final estimate and adjustment, routinely announced in February, was a downward revision of 589,000 or -0.4%.
Beach, the BLS commissioner during Trump’s first term, wrote in a post on X that McEntarfer’s firing was “totally groundless” and “sets a dangerous precedent and undermines the statistical mission of the Bureau.”
Beach, along with Erica Groshen, a former BLS commissioner under President Barack Obama, and other data experts who are part of a group called the Friends of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, posted a statement on Aug. 1, saying Trump’s claim that McEntarfer intentionally reported false information was “baseless” and “undermines the credibility of federal economic statistics that are a cornerstone of intelligent economic decision-making by businesses, families, and policymakers. U.S. official statistics are the gold standard globally.”
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