Trump’s Craziness on BLS

Donald Trump fired Bureau of Labor Statistics Commissioner Erika McEntarfer because he said she rigged the numbers to make him look bad. There is an effort by Republicans, and some in the media, to rewrite history in front of our eyes and to say the concern was competence and transparency. That is a lie as bad as Trump’s. Trump claimed she rigged the numbers: full stop.

In his famous Truth Social post firing McEntarfer, Trump explicitly blamed her for revising job numbers downward after the election. He said that she had inflated the numbers to make Biden-Harris look good before the election and then lowered them after the election.

“I was just informed that our Country’s ‘Jobs Numbers’ are being produced by a Biden Appointee, Dr. Erika McEntarfer, the Commissioner of Labor Statistics, who faked the Jobs Numbers before the Election to try and boost Kamala’s chances of Victory. This is the same Bureau of Labor Statistics that overstated the Jobs Growth in March 2024 by approximately 818,000 and, then again, right before the 2024 Presidential Election, in August and September, by 112,000. These were Records — No one can be that wrong?”

You have to be on some pretty serious drugs to interpret this complaint as being about inaccuracy. Trump says as clearly as he can that he does not think the problem is that McEntarfer is incompetent, the problem is she cheats: “No one can be that wrong?”

And in case anyone is still unclear that Trump was complaining about rigging, not inaccuracy, he repeated his complaint on Squawkbox the following Tuesday:

“And just days before the election, they put out numbers that it was like the country was on fire. Was doing so well. And then they did a revision about two weeks later, and the revision was down by almost 900,000 jobs. You remember that? And I said, But, man, I said, What would have happened? What would have happened if I lost, think of it, I would have said they gave phony numbers, and then they revised them a week and a half later.”

As reality fans have pointed out, the big downward jobs revision was in August of last year, more than two months before the election, and it got Biden-Harris some bad coverage at the time. For example, here is the New York Times piece discussing the revision. Here is the article in the Los Angeles Times. So, it’s utter nonsense that McEntarfer and BLS did anything to favor Biden.

An interesting point of trivia is that subsequent revisions after the election actually raised the number of jobs reported for October of 2024, the last month before the election. If we look at the job growth reported for the two years from October 2022 to October 2024, the data now show the economy created 4,445,000 jobs over this period or 185,000 a month. That compares to the 4,274,000, 178,000 a month, that was being reported on Election Day. If Kamala Harris was a cry baby like Trump, she would be screaming about the “rigged” election.¹

So, we should not let Trump’s backers distract anyone from reality. Trump fired McEntarfer because he claimed she rigged the numbers, not because he said the numbers were inaccurate. We can have serious discussions on statistical methods and what can be done to make BLS numbers more accurate. That has little do with McEntarfer, since the agency has long-established procedures which she could not change unilaterally even if she wanted to. Changes have to go through an extended vetting process and often require funding from Congress.

The agency does constantly try to improve its methods based on its own research and input from outside experts. If Trump’s backers have some concrete suggestions for improvements, they should put them on the table for BLS and others to evaluate.

To date, they have put up zip. They have prominently displayed some Silicon Valley type ignorance, like when Elon Musk told us 20 million dead people were getting Social Security checks. But they have not gotten into the weeds and shown how the BLS methods could be improved.

One final point, some Trumpers have complained that the real problem is a lack of transparency. BLS is incredibly transparent. They explain their methods in great detail for anyone interested in looking. It is absurd to blame BLS for a lack of transparency just because the Trumpers are too lazy to study the methods the agency uses.

In any case, this is a separate discussion. Trump fired McEntarfer because he claimed she rigged the numbers to make him look bad. That is an absurd lie on its face. And it is an equally absurd lie to claim that Trump’s concern was inaccuracy or transparency. It wasn’t.