U.S. President Donald Trump on Friday dismissed Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) Commissioner Erica MacEntarfer just hours after the release of a report showing a sharp slowdown in job growth during July.
In a heated post on his Truth Social platform, Trump launched fresh criticism at Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell and accused MacEntarfer, appointed under President Joe Biden, of manipulating employment data for political purposes.
“I was informed that our country’s job numbers are being produced by a Biden political appointee, Erica MacEntarfer, who rigged the figures before the election to boost Kamala Harris’s chances,” Trump wrote. “We need accurate job numbers, and I have directed my team to fire this political appointee immediately. She will be replaced by someone with greater competence and experience.”
NBC News confirmed that MacEntarfer has already been removed from her post. The BLS operates under the U.S. Department of Labor, currently headed by Trump appointee Lori Chavez-DeRemer.
The abrupt decision came on the same day the BLS reported that the U.S. economy added just 73,000 nonfarm jobs in July, far below expectations. The agency also sharply revised down employment figures for the previous two months, eliminating a combined 258,000 jobs from earlier estimates. This brought the three-month average job growth to just 35,000, the weakest pace since April 2020.
Trump and congressional Republicans have repeatedly criticized the BLS for what they describe as “large and politically suspicious” revisions to employment data. In his current budget proposal, Trump called for an 8% reduction in the bureau’s workforce, a move that raised concerns about the accuracy of its statistics on jobs, prices, and other key economic indicators.
The BLS has increasingly relied on estimated data to fill gaps in employment and inflation reports, amid mounting political pressure from the Trump administration.
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