President Trump has announced the firing of Erika McEntarfer, the commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), following weak jobs numbers reported by the independent government agency. The BLS confirmed that McEntarfer was terminated on Friday and named William Wiatrowski as acting head of the agency. The president accused McEntarfer, a 20-year government veteran elevated to the position in the Biden administration, of distorting the numbers for political purposes. Former Commerce Department official Jed Kolko stated that firing McEntarfer “is five-alarm intentional harm to the integrity of US economic data and the entire statistical system.”
The BLS is considered the gold standard among international labor data collectors, and economists consider its revisions process key to transparency and thoroughness. The establishment survey, on which the job growth numbers are based, comes from monthly contact with 121,000 employers nationwide. The agency revises the numbers after evaluating information that wasn’t available at the time of the initial report, including information from businesses that don’t respond before the report is released. The unemployment rate is not revised monthly, but revisions have been conducted since 1979, which can be so large that they change the perspective of the current state of economy, especially if a large company is late to report payrolls data.
The jobs numbers are also benchmarked yearly against unemployment insurance filings to ensure that the survey data lines up with actual employment as reflected in administrative records.
