Trump and his cronies insist Trump's firing of the BLS commissioner over disappointing jobs data was justifiedMehmet Eser/ZUMA
The shock and outrage over President Donald Trump firing the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) commissioner because of weak jobs numbers seems increasingly bipartisan.
Several Republican senators told NBC News that they did not support Trump’s firing of Erika McEntarfer if it was, in fact, motivated by his displeasure over the poor jobs numbers released on Friday. (All indications are that it was.) Democrats, meanwhile, said Trump’s latest move was the behavior of an authoritarian.
On Friday, Trump quickly claimed without any evidence that the revised jobs numbers, which showed weaker job growth in May and June than previously projected, had been “manipulated.” But experts on the work of the BLS, which is part of the Department of Labor, pushed back, saying Trump’s claim is not plausible.
Former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, who served in the Clinton administration, said on ABC’s This Week that Trump’s firing “is way beyond anything that Richard Nixon ever did.” Summers explained: “These numbers are put together by teams of literally hundreds of people following detailed procedures that are in manuals. There’s no conceivable way that the head of the BLS could have manipulated this number.”
On CNN’s State of the Union, former BLS Commissioner William Beach, who was appointed by Trump in 2019, said “there’s no way” the jobs numbers were “rigged” as Trump put it. “The commissioner doesn’t do anything to collect the numbers,” he said. “By the time the commissioner sees the numbers, they’re all prepared. They’re locked into the computer system.” Beach added that the firing “really hurts the statistical system” and “undermines credibility in BLS.” In a post on X, Beach called the firing “totally groundless” and said it “sets a dangerous precedent.”
The White House, nonetheless, is doubling down. Appearing on NBC’s Meet the Press and Fox News Sunday, Kevin Hassett, the director of the White House National Economic Council, denied that Trump would fire anyone whose data he disagrees with. Even so, Hassett added on Meet the Press: “The president wants his own people there, so that when we see the numbers, they’re more transparent and more reliable.” (Notably, Vice President JD Vance, when he was a US senator from Ohio, voted to confirm McEntarfer.)
When host Kristen Welker pressed Hassett for “hard evidence” that the numbers were “rigged,” as Trump claimed, Hassett first replied, “the revisions are hard evidence”—even though such revisions are, in fact, standard procedure. Later in the interview, Hassett added, “if you look at the number itself, it is the evidence.” And on Fox News Sunday, Hassett alleged that there are “partisan patterns” in the data, while offering no proof of that.
WATCH: National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett on trusting economic data: "The data have become very unreliable with these massive revisions over the last few years." pic.twitter.com/FtYB4UCBFv
— Fox News Sunday (@FoxNewsSunday) August 3, 2025
The only real pattern present seems to be a familiar one: bipartisan leaders and experts are decrying Trump’s actions as undermining and dangerous, while Trump and his cronies insist that they are the only ones who can be trusted.
