Scott Gurvey's Public Offerings

Every damn day. That’s what it seems like. Every damn day the man seventy-seven million Americans voted back into office does something more outrageous than the day before. It is exhausting.

Trump eviscerates environmental protections. He accuses former President Barack Obama of treason. He rips up labor agreements. He plans to privatize Social Security. He forces the Smithsonian to take down an exhibit that includes his two impeachments. The European Union, Japan, Columbia University, and CBS are all surrendering to him.

And now he fires the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics because he doesn’t like the jobs numbers.

I was willing to give Trump a pass when I saw the employment situation report for July, following my usual cautious policy of waiting for a trend to become clear and not jumping on a single report. But most economist saw weakness in the report and the always conservative Wall Street Journal flatly stated that U.S. hiring slowed sharply this summer.

Then Trump let loose with one of his all too familiar rants:

Trump followed up that rant with another, saying BLS Commissioner Erika McEntarfer would be “replaced with someone much more competent and qualified,” falsely claiming in another social-media post the government’s jobs numbers have been manipulated for political purposes.

I spent the better part of thirty years reading, analyzing, and reporting on this and other government economic reports and I have one comment on Trump’s allegation and response. It’s BS.

This may sound like something of importance mostly to labor economists and business reporters. But it is not. The credibility of American government statistics reporting is essential. It gives investors faith in their informed decisions. It guides fiscal and monetary policy. It tells businesses when to hire, when to expand and when to stay steady. When those numbers are tainted or appear to be, the entire structure of faith collapses. Markets lose faith in the data and in the country that produces it.

Yes, the BLS made some revisions to its May and June reports, reducing job growth. These kinds of revisions are routine as the BLS incorporates new data, even if these revisions were particularly large. The job of counting is getting harder as the response rate to BLS surveys falls. Businesses are asked to report their current payroll count by midmonth. Many, particularly small businesses, miss that deadline. The BLS then makes an estimate. The accurate count comes in later and is incorporated in the revisions. Each number gets revised on the two subsequent months. All of this is completely transparent.

This isn’t malpractice. The BLS has been asking Congress for funds to investigate the revisions and to increase its staff to provide more people to track down missing numbers. Congress, led by Republicans who oppose any new government spending, refuse.

“In my opinion, today’s Jobs Numbers were RIGGED in order to make the Republicans, and ME, look bad,” Trump wrote in a followup. As usual, Trump provided no evidence to support his attack. Trump is dead wrong. His post defames the BLS and all the good professionals who work there. People I know from my decades of reporting.

I do not know McEntarfer, the BLS Commissioner Trump fired. But I knew and interviewed several of her predecessors. They were all distinguished scholars. They are experts in their fields and indisputably nonpartisan. Dr. McEntarfer is a labor economist who has served over 20 years in federal government, serving presidents of both parties, with positions at the U.S. Census Bureau, the Executive Office of the President, and the Department of Treasury. At the U.S. Census Bureau, she was the a head of research.

The professionals at BLS, like those at Census and BEA, operate with a rigor and transparency that’s the backbone of economic reporting. Their methodologies are public, their revisions are documented, and their work is subject to peer review and scrutiny. To politicize that process is not just reckless, it’s destructive to the very idea of informed public discourse.

That is the type of discourse that Trump finds threatening. To replace McEntarfer Trump has picked conservative economist Erwin John Antoni, currently the chief economist at The Heritage Foundation and a frequent Fox Business commentator. He is blatantly partisan and recently proposed suspending the monthly jobs report, one of the most important data releases for the economy and markets.

He doesn’t appear to have published any formal academic research since his dissertation. Much of his commentary on the Heritage website praises Trump’s policies and economic record. If confirmed by the Senate, Antoni would run a 141-year-old agency staffed by around 2,000 economists, statisticians and other officials.

This isn’t just a bad personnel decision—it’s a direct challenge to the infrastructure of truth. It fits in with Trump’s purging of scientific studies, firing of independent advisors, censoring of the arts and museums, and relentless attacks on the news media and American universities. It’s especially galling given how transparent the BLS process is.

The BLS really can’t cook the numbers even if it wanted to. Or was ordered to do so by a president or a political hack at the helm. There are simply too many other sources, although not as comprehensive, of the employment statistics. Big companies employ their own economists and they track their own markets. They also know their own employment needs at any one time. The regional Federal Reserve Banks monitor their regions, as do state and local governments. The unemployment insurance system is run by the states and they regularly report on new claims. And there are industry trade associations keeping track of their market segments.

Sure you could put your finger on the scale and bias a report or two or maybe three. But if the BLS report was clearly trending on one direction while other data sources were trending the other way, people would notice.

Had Trump a basic knowledge of economics, he would have used the recent bad jobs numbers as a call for lower rates. Instead he says that the economy is great, the report is fake, but we still need rate cuts.

Only in Trump’s perverse world can he have it both ways

Update September 30, 2025

Donald Trump has withdraw the nomination of Erwin John Antoni to serve as head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

####