On the first Friday of every month, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) releases jobs numbers. When the monthly jobs report was released in August and revealed that only 73,000 jobs were created in July, President Donald Trump claimed, without presenting evidence, that the report was “rigged.”
The President then fired the BLS commissioner, Dr. Erika McEntarfer, claiming she had also “faked” the employment numbers leading up to the 2024 presidential election — a move, he said, meant to support the Biden-Harris administration and Kamala Harris’s candidacy.
(Trump’s accusation notably did not reference particularly strong news for the Democrats; the BLS reported on November 1, 2024 that total employment was essentially unchanged in the previous month.)
Among some economists and financiers, the McEntarfer firing cast doubt on the trustworthiness of future jobs reports, with its implication that data Trump doesn’t appreciate might be suppressed by future BLS commissioners hoping to keep their jobs.
On Thursday when CNN’s John Berman asked Trump’s Director of the National Economic Council Kevin Hassett, “Jobs report coming out next week, Kevin, you gonna believe the numbers?”, Hassett laughed.
Q: Jobs report coming out next week. You gonna believe the numbers?
— FactPost (@factpostnews) August 28, 2025
Top Trump econ advisor: Ha ha ha. You know there's a lot of work that needs to be done to make it so that the numbers are more reliable. Something that we need a new team to have a look at pic.twitter.com/4bTzJs9Bqm
Hassett then replied, and echoed Trump’s complaints last month: “You know, there’s a lot of work that needs to be done, to make it so the numbers are more reliable. The extent to which the BLS survey response rates haven’t improved, and makes the data very unreliable with huge reviews is something we need a new team to have a look at.”
Hassett laughed again, “I think they’ll be as good as they can be.”
Note: Former BLS commissioner William Beach, who was nominated by Trump during his first term, said that it’s “impossible” for a BLS commissioner to manipulate the data.
Beach said: “The commissioner does not even see the numbers … until the numbers are completely done and they’re loaded and ready to be distributed.” He added: “Then the commissioner is briefed Wednesday afternoon prior to the Friday release. And that’s the first time the commissioner sees those numbers.”
Beach also noted that revisions to job numbers — which were a major part of Trump’s complaint — are common. “I’ve never seen a situation where we don’t have revisions,” Beach said. “These are big revisions because we’re probably at a turning point in the economy.”
