Trump Fires the Commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics for Publishing a Report He Found Insufficiently Optimistic About the Impact of His Tariff Policies

Aug 02, 2025

Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin was notorious for firing officials—or sending them to the gulag—for delivering bad news about the failure of his policies. Donald Trump is now copying this, hoping he can make bad news disappear by firing the person in charge of compiling the statistics.

The New York Times reports:

In a long post on social media, Mr. Trump said he had directed his team to fire Erika McEntarfer, the commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, who was confirmed on a bipartisan basis in 2024. …
The president fired Dr. McEntarfer after the bureau released monthly jobs data showing surprisingly weak hiring in July and large downward revisions to job growth in the previous two months. Economists widely interpreted the report as evidence that Mr. Trump’s policies were beginning to take a toll on the economy, though the president insisted in a subsequent post that the country was “doing GREAT!” …
Economists across the ideological spectrum said Mr. Trump’s move to oust Dr. McEntarfer was likely to erode public confidence in the data published by the administration.
“If you want people to stop trusting the numbers coming out of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, firing the person who is confirmed by the Senate to make sure those numbers are trustworthy is a real good way to do it,” said Martha Gimbel, the executive director of the Budget Lab at Yale, who served in the White House under Mr. Biden.

The obvious purpose for this is to keep Trump in office by claiming economic growth that does not exist. But given Trump’s problems with math, making him the sole arbiter of economic statistics will mean everybody is flying blind, with no way of telling what is actually happening or making sound decisions.

The Executive Watch is a project of the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism, and its flagship publication The UnPopulist, to track in an ongoing way the abuses of the power of the American presidency. It sorts these abuses into five categories: Personal Grift, Political Corruption, Presidential Retribution, Power Consolidation, and Policy Illegality. Click the category of interest to get an overview of all the abuses under it.

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