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Former Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) Commissioner Erika McEntarfer criticized President Trump on Tuesday, shortly after her dismissal for alleged data manipulation.
Trump terminated McEntarfer last month, accusing her of falsifying job statistics ahead of the 2024 election to enhance Kamala Harris’s electoral prospects.
Her firing followed a disappointing July jobs report, which revealed that the U.S. economy added only 73,000 jobs, with previous months’ figures being revised downward.
Prior to her dismissal, Trump had claimed that McEntarfer was distorting job numbers to cast him in a negative light. He stated, “In my opinion, today’s Jobs Numbers were RIGGED in order to make the Republicans, and ME, look bad… A TOTAL SCAM. Jerome ‘Too Late’ Powell is no better! But, the good news is, our Country is doing GREAT!”
During her first public comments since being fired, McEntarfer addressed the issue indirectly while lecturing at the Levy Economics Institute at Bard College, characterizing her termination as a “dangerous step.”
She expressed surprise at the firing, revealing that she learned of it when a reporter reached out for her reaction. She reflected, “August 1 was like any other first Friday of the month when the job numbers come out… Except, by the end of that day, I had been very publicly fired by the president of the United States and was on my way to becoming a household name. It was quite a day, to say the least.”
McEntarfer warned, “Firing your chief statistician is a dangerous step. That’s an attack on the independence of an institution arguably as important as the Federal Reserve for economic stability. It has serious economic consequences, but that they would do this with no warning — it made no sense.”
She further likened tampering with economic data to disrupting traffic signals, stating, “Messing with economic data is like messing with the traffic lights and turning the sensors off. Cars don’t know where to go, traffic backs up at intersections,” addressing concerns raised by economists following her dismissal.
