President Donald Trump might regret sacking his last Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) chief because the new numbers are in and they’re just as bad as before.
Released Wednesday, the agency’s latest Job Openings and Labor Turnover report recorded just 7.18 million employment listings for July. It’s only the second time they’ve dipped below 7.2 million since the last quarter of 2020, at the height of the COVID pandemic.
It’s also lower than even independent economists, polled by Dow Jones, had forecasted, fueling widespread concerns of a weakening job market amid the Trump administration’s turbulent handling of the economy and ongoing trade war against much of the rest of the planet.
“This is a turning point for the labor market,” Heather Long, an economist with the Navy Federal Credit Union, told CNBC Wednesday.
“It’s yet another crack,” she went on, adding the new figures were “underscoring how this job market is frozen and it’s difficult for anyone to get a job right now.”
The latest stats of course come after Trump controversially fired BLS Commissioner Erika McEntarfer last month. Her dismissal came after the agency released numbers showing employers had only generated 73,000 new jobs for July, well short of the 109,000 outlined in White House forecasts, and revised its estimate of employment stats for May and June down by more than 250,000.
At the time, Trump slammed McEntarfer for having “RIGGED” those numbers “to make the Republicans, and ME, look bad,” in the face of massive backlash to what represented the biggest non-COVID-related drop in more than four decades.
His decision to replace McEntarfer with E.J. Antoni—chief economist at the ultraconservative Heritage Foundation, and a leading architect of the think tank’s controversial Project 2025 blueprint for a second MAGA White House—also drew fire.
The Wall Street Journal wrote in an August editorial that Antoni “will have to take off his MAGA hat if he wants to ensure that the public and markets can trust BLS data,” given widespread concern that the longevity of McEntarfer’s replacement may well depend on producing results the White House finds more agreeable.
The Daily Beast has reached out to the White House for comment on this story.
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