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WASHINGTON (CN) — Congressional Democrats on Friday accused President Donald Trump of “sticking his head in the sand” on the economy after the president sacked the head of the government’s labor statistics agency.
Trump’s move to fire Erika McEntarfer, commissioner of the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, came hours after the agency published its July jobs report, which revealed a weaker-than-expected performance in the American employment market. The president suggested that McEntarfer, appointed by former President Joe Biden, had meddled with jobs numbers for political purposes.
“She will be replaced by someone much more competent and qualified,” Trump wrote in a post on his social media platform, Truth Social. “Important numbers like this must be fair and accurate, they can’t be manipulated for political purposes.”
According to the BLS report published Friday, employers added only 73,000 jobs in July, a figure that fell far short of estimates. The agency also issued a major revision to its numbers for May and June, cutting more than 200,000 jobs from those two previous reports.
Trump and the White House have pointed to jobs reports over the last few months as evidence that the administration’s economic policy was working. And the president, furious over both the meager numbers for July and the BLS revision, laid blame at McEntarfer’s feet. He suggested, without evidence, that the labor statistics commissioner had “faked” jobs numbers in 2024 to help then-Vice President Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign.
The BLS in August revised its own employment statistics and said the economy had created roughly 818,000 fewer jobs than the agency had reported. There’s no evidence that those figures were manipulated to assist a political campaign.
Still, Trump questioned how the BLS could have made a mistake in its jobs report. “These were records — no one can be that wrong?” he wrote.
On Capitol Hill, Democratic lawmakers bashed the president for firing McEntarfer and argued that he had sacked her to distract from his administration’s lackluster economic performance.
“The president doesn’t like the jobs numbers his policies have caused, so he fired the person in charge of collecting the data,” wrote Nevada Senator Catherine Cortez Masto in a post on X. “Donald Trump sticking his head in the sand won’t change the fact that Nevada workers are hurting, and he doesn’t have a plan to fix it.”
Delaware Senator Chris Coons similarly accused Trump of using McEntarfer as a shield from the unfortunate reality. “Just because he doesn’t like the disastrous results of his economic policies, that doesn’t mean they’re not real,” he said.
Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, the top Democrat on the upper chamber’s committee handling health, education and labor issues, said the BLS report demonstrated that average Americans are struggling despite record stock market performance.
“Rather than accept reality and try to address it, Trump chooses to fire the bearers of bad news,” said Sanders. “This is what authoritarians do.”
McEntarfer was head of the BLS for just over a year following her bipartisan confirmation in January 2024, under then-President Biden. Before that, she was a senior labor economist at the U.S. Census Bureau’s Center for Economic Studies. McEntarfer has also worked at the Treasury Department’s tax policy office and was a staffer on the Biden administration’s Council of Economic Advisers.
William Wiatrowski, deputy commissioner of the BLS, will serve as the agency’s acting head following McEntarfer’s sacking.
The BLS, which has existed in some form since 1884, is the government’s preeminent agency for labor economics. It operates under the U.S. Department of Labor.
In a statement posted to X on Friday, Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer said she agreed “wholeheartedly” with Trump that jobs numbers must be accurate and “never manipulated for political purposes.”
“I support the president’s decision to replace Biden’s commissioner and ensure the American people can trust the important and influential data coming from BLS,” Chavez-DeRemer wrote.
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