Trump administration officials question data amid condemnation of dismissal of Bureau of Labor Statistics head.
The White House has defended United States President Donald Trump’s firing of the top official responsible for compiling employment statistics after her dismissal raised concerns about the future credibility of crucial economic data.
Trump fired Erika McEntarfer, the director of the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), on Friday, claiming without evidence that the latest jobs report had been “rigged” to make him look bad.
On Sunday, Kevin Hassett, the director of the White House National Economic Council, denied that Trump was “shooting the messenger” and questioned the accuracy of the figures showing much weaker hiring than previously reported.
“The president wants his own people there so that when we see the numbers, they’re more transparent and more reliable,” Hassett told NBC News’s Meet the Press, calling the downward revision of jobs growth for May and June “unprecedented” and a “historically important outlier”.
“And if there are big changes and big revisions – we expect more big revisions for the jobs data in September, for example – then we want to know why. We want people to explain it to us.”
Speaking on Fox News later on Sunday, Hassett again poured doubt on the official figures, suggesting without evidence that employment statistics can sometimes contain “partisan patterns”.
“I think what we need is a fresh set of eyes at the BLS, somebody who can clean this thing up,” he told Fox News Sunday.
US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer also defended Trump’s dismissal of McEntarfer, saying the president had “real concerns” about the jobs data.
“You want to be able to have somewhat reliable numbers,” Greer told CBS News’ Face the Nation.
“There are always revisions, but sometimes you see these revisions go in really extreme ways. And it’s, you know, the president is the president. He can choose who works in the executive branch.”
The latest employment figures released on Friday showed that 258,000 fewer jobs were created in May and June than previously estimated, and that a fewer-than-expected 73,000 jobs were added in July, undermining Trump’s insistence that the economy has not been negatively affected by his sweeping tariffs.
Trump said on Sunday that he would announce a new BLS director, as well as a candidate to fill the position left open by the resignation of Federal Reserve governor Adriana Kugler, within the next few days.
Trump’s dismissal of McEntarfer, a career bureaucrat who was appointed with overwhelming bipartisan support in 2024, has prompted condemnation from economists and both Republican and Democratic lawmakers.
In a statement on Friday, The Friends of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, a group co-led by former BLS directors William Beach and Erica L Groshen, accused Trump of politicising the statistics agency and undermining confidence in official government data.
“US official statistics are the gold standard globally,” the group said.
“When leaders of other nations have politicised economic data, it has destroyed public trust in all official statistics and in government science.”