Trump defends decision to fire labor statistics head

President Donald Trump on Sunday said he would find an exceptional replacement for the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, whom he fired on Friday after the release of a jobs report. The president repeated what he’s said before, that former bureau head Erika McEntarfer changed the numbers to hide Republican successes. The jobs report released Friday said that the United States only added 73,000 jobs in July, much fewer than many economists anticipated. The department also revised its figures for May and June, bringing the number down by 258,000 jobs.

Trump said that McEntarfer, a Biden appointee, overstated jobs numbers several times last year, including just before the presidential election. He accused McEntarfer of doing so on purpose to assist Kamala Harris’ campaign. The new jobs report was similarly rigged, he said.

McEntarfer on Friday said that her job at the helm of the bureau had been the honor of her life. She worked alongside many dedicated civil servants and thanked them for their service in a post on the Bluesky social media platform.

Have former bureau officials reacted to the decision? The former head of the bureau, William Beach, on Friday said the firing set a dangerous precedent and undermined the bureau’s mission. The bureau uses a decentralized process to analyze and report data, he said in a joint statement. It always revises data from previous months as more information becomes available, he said. Beach was nominated by Trump in 2017 to lead the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Dig deeper: Read Lauren Canterberry’s report on how a pro-abortion OB-GYN group refused federal funds due to the Trump administration’s policies.