Trump redoubles attack on federal jobs data, calls numbers political

Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have expressed concern about Trump’s firing of Erika McEntarfer, the top official overseeing employment statistics.

Updated
August 5, 2025 at 4:55 p.m. EDT yesterday at 4:55 p.m. EDT
4 min


President Donald Trump in May. (Matt McClain/The Washington Post)

By Emily Davies, Jacob Bogage and Andrew Ackerman

President Donald Trump doubled down on his decision to dismiss the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, casting the agency that published a bleak jobs report last week as broken and corrupt. … “It’s a highly political situation,” Trump said Tuesday morning on CNBC’s “Squawk Box.” “It’s totally rigged.” Trump offered no evidence for his assertion, which his former BLS commissioner has said is not true.
Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have criticized his decision to fire Erika McEntarfer, the top official overseeing employment statistics, saying that ousting her calls into question the independence and stability of the federal agency that reports some of the nation’s most critical economic data.

Defending his action in the CNBC interview, Trump complained about the timing of previous jobs reports released by the bureau, but he got the timeline wrong. He said downward revisions of the number of new jobs in the economy happened only after he was elected president. Early last August, during Joe Biden’s presidency, the agency reported rising unemployment and a cooling jobs market. Later that month the bureau reported that the economy had created 818,000 fewer jobs than it had previously reported from April 2023 through March 2024, marking the largest annual revision to federal jobs data in 15 years.

“STOCK MARKETS ARE CRASHING, JOBS NUMBERS ARE TERRIBLE, WE ARE HEADING TO WORLD WAR III, AND WE HAVE TWO OF THE MOST INCOMPETENT ‘LEADERS’ IN HISTORY,” Trump posted to Truth Social on Aug. 5, 2024, as he campaigned to replace Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris. “THIS IS NOT GOOD!!!”

That downward revision was eclipsed by what the bureau reported Friday: Hiring in May and June dropped by a quarter-million jobs, a bigger decrease than previously reported. It is the steepest two-month downward revision on record outside the pandemic. Economists have attributed the slowdown in hiring in part to uncertainty fueled by Trump administration policies, including an erratic approach to trade and tougher immigration enforcement, as well as elevated interest rates and federal spending cuts.

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