The government statistician President Trump fired for releasing a gloomy jobs report last month warned that her firing is a bad omen for the American economy.
Erika McEntarfer, a labor economist who led the Bureau of Labor Statistics, spoke publicly on Tuesday for the first time since her abrupt firing via Truth Social on August 1.
“Firing your chief statistician is a dangerous step,” McEntarfer said during a lecture she gave at Bard College, her alma mater.
“That’s an attack on the independence of an institution arguably as important as the Federal Reserve for economic stability,” she said, adding that interfering with economic data “is like messing with the traffic lights.”
“Cars don’t know where to go, traffic backs up at intersections.”
The BLS tracks employment and inflation, publishing monthly reports on the former that are based on surveying both workers and businesses.
The bureau’s monthly jobs report for July showed that the U.S. added 73,000 new jobs, a slowdown in growth. It also revised down the jobs figures for May and June, from 140,000 to 19,000 and from 147,000 to 14,000, respectively.
While jobs report revisions are common fare, Trump immediately accused McEntarfer of fudging the numbers.
“I have directed my Team to fire this Biden Political Appointee, IMMEDIATELY,” Trump fired off on Truth Social just six hours after the report became public.
“She will be replaced with someone much more competent and qualified,” Trump wrote. “Important numbers like this must be fair and accurate, they can’t be manipulated for political purposes.”
McEntarfer was confirmed by an 86-8 vote in the Senate in January 2024, after serving for two decades in various nonpolitical roles across Republican and Democratic administrations.
She said on Tuesday that Trump’s outburst came a day after she briefed members of the White House on the numbers and received what she called “normal” questions from the economists there.
While there, she explained that large jobs revisions, like the ones affecting the May and June numbers, tend to happen “when the economy slows.”
The next day, she was out.
The White House’s own chief economist, Stephen Miran, said that the July figures were “less than ideal” and made no mention of any problems in the report’s methodology.
The White House did not immediately respond to request for comment.
After firing McEntarfer, Trump tabbed a MAGA loyalist to lead the bureau, E.J. Antoni, who economists from both sides of the aisle labelled as unqualified for the role.
“There are a lot of competent conservative economists that could do this job. E.J. is not one of them,” wrote one economist on X from the right-leaning Tax Foundation.
Antoni was also spotted at the Capitol on January 6, when he was working as an economist for the conservative Texas Public Policy Foundation.
The White House told NBC that Antoni, 37, was “observing” the mob gathering there and did not engage in “anything inappropriate or illegal.”
Antoni generated more negative headlines for the administration due to a photo hanging in his office of a Nazi battleship and the discovery of old social media accounts where he posted lurid conspiracy theories about Democratic politicians.
McEntarfer questioned on Tuesday whether the independence of the BLS will hold up in the wake of Trump’s attacks on the bureau and Antoni’s track record of partisanship.
“After the events of the last six weeks, I’m afraid we have to fear for the dependence of the agencies themselves,” she said.
Labor market conditions have continued to worsen since McEntarfer’s firing, with the most recent BLS report released earlier this month showing that unemployment crept up to 4.3%—the highest it’s been since April 2021.
That report also showed that there was a net loss of jobs in June, which hadn’t happened since the depths of the pandemic in December 2020.
Many economists say that Trump’s tariffs on U.S. trading partners, which were imposed starting in the spring, are the primary culprit for the receding employment figures.
“This disappointing number is a result of all the turmoil of tariffs and trade wars,” said Stephen Moore, an economics fellow at the Heritage Foundation, after the August jobs report.
The post Fired Stats Boss Makes Ominous Warning About Trump Economy appeared first on The Daily Beast.
