President Donald Trump alleged on Monday that the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ employment data revisions last year favored Democrats, although the pre-election revisions appear to have hurt Democrats.
In a surprise move on Friday, Trump announced he had fired BLS Commissioner Erika McEntarfer. The announcement came just hours after a worse-than-expected monthly jobs report that included major downward revisions.
The July jobs report revealed that some 258,000 fewer jobs were added in May and June than previously reported. That means the three-month moving average of job gains was just 35,000 in July, below the level needed to keep pace with population growth.
Trump claimed the numbers were “rigged” and went a step further when he accused the BLS under McEntarfer of revising the numbers before the election to favor Democrats and presumably then-Vice President Kamala Harris, who was working to defend against attacks over former President Joe Biden’s stewardship of the economy.
“That’s why, in both cases, there was massive, record setting revisions, in favor of the Radical Left Democrats,” Trump wrote on social media.
If anything, though, the downward revisions could have been seen as hurting Harris and Democrats. If the revisions had come after the election, it would have meant that Harris could tell voters that job growth was stronger than it was. But they did not come after the election. The last jobs report for October, released just days before voters went to the polls, showed that just 12,000 jobs were added that month and revised the gains for September and August by a combined 112,000.
“Literally the last thing that people are hearing about jobs as they’re going into the election is that they’re going very badly under the current administration, the Biden administration,” Sean Higgins, a research fellow at the libertarian Competitive Enterprise Institute, told the Washington Examiner.
In a Monday analysis, Higgins called the pre-election BLS release a “gut punch” for Harris that “likely contributed to Trump’s eventual win.”
Additionally, at the height of campaign season in August last year, the BLS announced that a whopping 818,000 fewer jobs had been created between March 2023 and March 2024, another revision that presumably hurt Harris and Democrats.
“The president himself is revising history and not in a truthful way, and no one who pays attention to the data — and even some people who don’t — believe that this data collection and reporting process is undermined by political influence,” said Mark Hamrick, senior economic analyst at Bankrate.
Hamrick also pointed out that the claim is also strange in that the BLS’s most recent downward revisions for this summer put pressure on the Federal Reserve to cut interest rates more quickly, an outcome Trump has been lobbying for.
The Fed has a dual mandate: price stability and maximum employment. Recently, Fed officials have held out on cutting interest rates because inflation is still above the central bank’s 2% target, punching in at about 2.6% in the Fed’s preferred gauge. But at the same time, the economy has appeared relatively strong.
So even if inflation were a bit high, the Fed might decide to cut rates if unemployment started rising or there were signs of a recession on the horizon.
In fact, Friday’s report did raise expectations that an interest rate cut would come sooner rather than later.
While an interest rate cut in September seemed very uncertain before the Friday jobs report and after the Fed’s latest interest rate decision last week, as of Monday, investors are pegging nearly 9-10 odds that the Fed will cut rates next month, according to the CME Group’s FedWatch tool, which calculated the probability using futures contract prices for rates in the short-term market targeted by the Fed.
“Powell said last week, if the job market were deteriorated, and he pointed more to the unemployment rate, they would perhaps then view the maximum employment part of their mandate at most risk,” Hamrick told the Washington Examiner.
Some supporters of Trump’s firing of McEntarfer argue that the decision was based more on the trend of inaccurate numbers and the need to rework the reporting process.
E.J. Antoni, an economist with the conservative Heritage Foundation, was surprised by how long it took Trump to fire McEntarfer. He said it came down to “incompetence” rather than any political motives.
“Just the timing is very unfortunate, because it makes it look like you’re just firing the person because you weren’t happy with the numbers, as opposed to firing for incompetence, which I think has been the case for a couple of years now,” Antoni told the Washington Examiner.
He wished Trump’s post had been different, adding that there is no need to “allege any shenanigans” at play other than “general incompetence.” He highlighted low survey response rates for BLS surveys as evidence of McEntarfer’s ineffectiveness in the role. Antoni also said he didn’t like that BLS is still doing, in addition to other methods, phone surveys in 2025.
McEntarfer has been relatively mum since she was fired on Friday, save for a post on the Bluesky social media platform:
“It has been the honor of my life to serve as Commissioner of BLS alongside the many dedicated civil servants tasked with measuring a vast and dynamic economy,” McEntarfer said. “It is vital and important work and I thank them for their service to this nation.”
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Trump has said he intends to announce a replacement to lead the BLS in the coming days. McEntarfer’s replacement will have to be confirmed by the Senate and could face skepticism, given the timing of McEntarfer’s dismissal and the concerns raised by Trump.
“Unfortunately, whoever is appointed is already going to have some credibility questions, simply because of the way that the president manages the appointment process in his job more broadly,” Hamrick said.