As it has for over a hundred years, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) will release its latest monthly jobs report on Friday.
But the routine monthly update on the health of the US jobs market has been overshadowed by Donald Trump’s firing of the agency’s commissioner, Erika McEntarfer, hours after July’s statistics were released last month.
The BLS’s data is parsed by Wall Street, Federal Reserve officials and company bosses across the US. It is also widely watched – and admired – internationally as a barometer of the US economy.
Both liberal and conservative economists have criticized Trump’s nominated replacement at the BLS and have raised concerns over what will happen to the agency after the dramatic shake-up. Here’s what we know about what’s happening to the bureau.
What does the Bureau of Labor Statistics do?
The bureau reports key economic statistics through surveys of employers and prices. Every month, it releases data on the labor market, including the current unemployment rate, and the Consumer Price Index (CPI), which measures the cost of a basket of goods and services. This data is an important monthly snapshot of the US economy and how it changes over time.
Why did Trump fire the bureau’s commissioner?
Last month, the bureau announced the US had added just 73,000 jobs in July – far lower than expected – and made big revisions to previously released stats on the labor market in May and June. The number of jobs added to the economy across those two months was dramatically cut by over 250,000.
Trump, who spent months boasting about the strength of the economy amid fears about the impact of his trade wars, was furious. “Today’s Job Numbers were RIGGED in order to make the Republicans, and ME, look bad,” he declared on social media.
Hours after the numbers were released, Trump announced he was firing McEntarfer and that she would “be replaced with someone much more competent and qualified”.
Has Trump firing of the bureau’s commissioner changed its operations?
Economists say that Trump’s firing hasn’t changed the bureau, yet. Although the White House has made other job cuts at the BLS, as it did throughout the federal workforce. Since Trump took office, the bureau has seen a hiring freeze and has lost 15% of its workforce.
While the bureau said it was downsizing its data collection for CPI, it did not say it was making any significant changes to its survey to employers.
Economists say that, for now, the bureau’s operations have largely remained the same. William Watrowski, a longtime leader within the bureau, is currently its acting commissioner. But there are still many questions about the future of the bureau, especially after Trump announced his nomination for McEntarfer’s replacement.
Who does Trump want to appoint as the bureau’s new commissioner?
Trump has nominated EJ Antoni, chief economist at the conservative Heritage Foundation, as the bureau’s commissioner.
Antoni was a contributor to Project 2025 – the Heritage Foundation’s rightwing blueprint for reshaping the US government – and was a vocal critic of the bureau last year, claiming that it manipulated numbers to make them more favorable to Joe Biden and Democrats. Last November, Antoni said on Twitter that Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency needed to “take a chainsaw” to the bureau.
“Month after month, the government bean-counters under former-president Biden published overly optimistic estimates for everything from job growth to the size of the economy, only to have those numbers routinely – and quietly – revised down later,” Antoni wrote in May.
When announcing his appointment, Trump said Antoni “will ensure that the Numbers released are HONEST AND ACCURATE”.
Antoni has yet to be confirmed by Congress, and a confirmation date has not been set.
Revisions are standard to the bureau’s reporting of the labor market, which is based on surveys to employers throughout the country.
Large revisions often happen when employers take more time to complete the bureau’s surveys or revise their own figures due to changing circumstances. Economists have pointed out that uncertainty can lead to larger revisions. The pandemic, for example, saw jobs figures in flux as employers were handling different shutdown laws and the spread of the virus.
The impact of Trump’s tariffs on data collection could be a major factor in the revisions seen earlier this year. Businesses have been reporting rollercoaster levels of uncertainty over tariff policy, with sentiment among US small businesses dipping down in the spring before going up again in the summer.
“We’ve gone through periods where there were larger revisions before,” said Michael Madowitz, principal economist at the Roosevelt Institute who served on the bureau’s data users advisory committee before it was dissolved by the Trump administration. “This is like so standard, and the idea that it’s what actually set off this big political kerfuffle – this is a really unprecedented political situation.”
Has the bureau gone through any political fights before?
This isn’t the first time the bureau has been accused of manipulating numbers for politics. In the mid-90s, Alan Greenspan, the Federal Reserve chair at the time, criticized the way the bureau was calculating the CPI. Greenspan argued that the bureau was overestimating CPI, making inflation look higher than it actually was.
Thomas Stapleford, a historian at the University of Notre Dame and author of The Cost of Living in America: A Political History of Economic Statistics, pointed out that Greenspan’s criticism led to a series of hearings where the bureau’s methodology came under question and debate. There were congressional hearings and a committee of economists was formed to investigate the methodology.
“There’s all this detailed look at digging into the methodology by these outside experts and also testimony from [the bureau],” Stapleford said. “In my mind, if you have questions about the methodology, that’s the way to approach it.”
But Trump has pushed the bureau into uncharted waters. Stapleford noted McEntarfer’s firing was the first time the president fired a bureau commissioner.
“What the administration, in the eyes of critics, is doing is pushing the numbers in a particular direction. Not for reasons that it can justify publicly in terms of methodology, but simply because it would like a different outcome,” Stapleford said. “That’s a really big deviation from how the bureau has operated in the past.”
What does this all mean for the future of the bureau?
The commissioner isn’t involved in much of the day-to-day operations of the bureau. A new leader could have major sway over how the bureau collects and reports data in the long term, but there are protections in place, and any significant changes would be subject to public scrutiny.
“The commissioner isn’t directly involved in the data calculation. Most of the BLS staff are long-term civil servants. They’ve been there a long time, they have various protections around them,” Stapleford said. “If the new commissioner started to force major methodological changes, I think that would raise a lot of red flags if those changes were controversial.”
But even if major changes aren’t made immediately, the fact that Trump has called the bureau’s data into question could risk confusing Americans over whether the data can be trusted.
“It takes a whole lot longer to build credibility than to lose. I don’t think any of the experts involved at this point are at all worried about the credibility of BLS’s work, but I know a whole lot less about what’s filtering down to the average person right now,” Madowitz said.
As an example, Madowitz pointed out how the science around climate change has been clear.
“But having a one-side, other-side public position on what the science says has left the public really confused,” Madowitz said. “It would be really bad if that’s how we decided to understand the economy.”
