Trump Should Have Fired McEntarfer Long Ago | The American Spectator

The corporate news media greeted the lackluster jobs report that dropped on August 1 with unabated glee, and savored President Trump’s complaints concerning its accuracy. They were less pleased, however, when he fired Commissioner of Labor Statistics Erika McEntarfer. The coverage of her termination was predictable. CNN, for example, went with the following headline: “Trump fires a senior official over jobs numbers.” In reality, McEntarfer’s termination was long overdue. She was a Biden appointee whose tenure at the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) has been characterized by disarray.

Her leadership of the BLS involved implausibly robust job growth estimates during former President Biden’s final year in office and recurring technical issues. The Washington Post reluctantly ran this story: “The Bureau of Labor Statistics said Wednesday that a technical issue caused delays last week in the scheduled release of jobs data … The episode is at least the third in a series of missteps this year.” McEntarfer’s tenure was also plagued with huge downward revisions in reported job gains. As the New York Times reported in August of 2024:

On Wednesday, the Labor Department said monthly payroll figures overstated job growth by roughly 818,000 in the 12 months that ended in March. That suggests employers added about 174,000 jobs per month during that period, down from the previously reported pace of about 242,000 jobs — a downward revision of about 28 percent … The updated numbers are the latest sign of vulnerability in the job market, which until recently had appeared rock solid despite months of high interest rates and economists’ warnings of an impending recession.

This gigantic downward revision was not merely the second largest on record, it doesn’t include normal monthly revisions. When those adjustments are added, McEntarfer’s BLS leadership appears either incompetent or corrupt. As the Daily Caller reported at the time, “Including monthly revisions, the Biden administration overstated the number of jobs in the U.S. economy by 1.18 million in the year through March, accounting for approximately 36 percent of the 3.24 million jobs initially claimed.” The legacy media have made much of President Trump’s claim that the job numbers are rigged, but McEntarfer’s record hardly rules it out.

Nonetheless, the soporific Sunday morning news programs highlighted Trump’s skepticism about the accuracy of the BLS report. On Meet the Press, moderator Kristen Welker insisted that White House economic adviser Kevin Hassett produce concrete evidence that the numbers were rigged. Hassett noted that the BLS didn’t release the huge downward revision discussed above until after former President Biden abandoned his reelection campaign: “There have been a bunch of patterns that could make people wonder.” Weirdly, the Wall Street Journal placed part of the blame for these downward revisions on tariffs and immigration raids:

One plausible explanation for last year’s big downward revision may be that the BLS model overestimated business formation and hiring by smaller establishments that didn’t respond to its surveys. Small businesses were especially harmed by the Biden regulatory blitz and inflation. The same is true of Mr. Trump’s tariffs and immigration raids … Mom-and-pop restaurants might have lost immigrant workers and struggled to replace them. Small manufacturers with tight margins might have reduced jobs in response to tariff costs and uncertainty.

While it obviously makes sense to point the finger at the Biden regulatory blitz and his administration’s inflationary spending, it’s quite literally impossible for Trump’s tariffs and immigration policies to have caused an 818,000 revision that was announced five months before the man was inaugurated. This is of a piece with the Wall Street Journal’s utterly irresponsible story about a “bawdy letter” Trump allegedly sent to Jeffrey Epstein in 2003. Ironically, the WSJ editor who approved that tabloid nonsense has succeeded only in uniting the MAGA base. And it is probable that the latest BLS jobs report will produce the same effect.

The corporate news media, like those Democrats who are now fleeing Texas in order to prevent their Republican colleagues from passing a redistricting plan, are having enormous difficulty getting the big picture. Both the “mainstream media” and “the Party of Jefferson and Jackson” refuse to accept the political realities of 2025. No one trusts these people. The voters know they lie all the time, even when the truth will do, and the myriad COVID-19 deceptions taught them not to trust statistics produced by federal agencies. Consequently, when Trump says the BLS jobs report is rigged, they understand all too well that he could be absolutely right.

As to Erika McEntarfer, most voters had never heard of her until this weekend, and very few will lose sleep because she has become suddenly unemployed. Indeed, most of the people who voted for Trump in 2024 will be thinking, “Why didn’t he fire her in January?”

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