Trump vs. the Bureau of Labor Statistics

On Friday, the Bureau of Labor Statistics released its monthly jobs report.

Our colleague Matt Grossman, who covers business and financial news, was following the story as he usually does.

Friday morning started with a routine jobs report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

This is a report that we get every month on the first Friday of the month, giving information on the previous month's labor market.

This jobs report was the weakest one to come since the beginning of President Donald Trump's second term.

The report said that the economy added 73,000 jobs in July, which was less than economists had expected.

But maybe the bigger news was that the labor department said that in May and June, the economy actually added 258,000 fewer jobs than it had initially reported in those months.

To economists, it was clear.

The report showed signs of a slowing economy.

And that really seemed to enrage President Trump.

And a few hours later, he announced that he was firing the commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Erica McIntarfer, alleging that she was presiding over an office that was rigging the statistics to make a political point against him.

For decades, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which is part of the Labor Department, has been relied upon upon as a nonpartisan and impartial agency.

And

there's really, for decades, never been any serious allegations that the numbers are skewed for political purposes.

So it was very unusual for a president to add a political spin to the office and was really a shock to people who follow the statistics.

Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business, and power.

I'm Jessica Mendoza.

It's It's Monday, August 4th.

Coming up on the show, the drama over data at the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

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What is the monthly jobs report?

What's in it?

Monthly jobs report has two main sets of data.

One is called the Establishment Survey, which asks about 120,000 businesses a very simple question, how many people work for you?

And that survey is used to get a picture across the whole economy of how many jobs are being created or destroyed, how many people have been hired, how many people have lost their jobs.

Of course, this is a number that politicians always fixate on.

This robust growth, 4.2%, is touching the lives of all our people.

Our businesses created another 121,000 jobs last month.

We often hear a president talking about how many jobs were created during his term or during the previous president's term.

Now it's 4 million jobs created since the election.

528,000 jobs were added just last month to this country's employment.

In addition to asking businesses about their hiring numbers, the Labor Department also surveys households about employment.

That survey is the basis for the nation's unemployment rate.

So the monthly jobs reports combining these two sets of information, the payroll survey and the household survey, to give, first of all, the job creation totals, and second of all, the unemployment rate.

And running the whole show here at the Bureau of Labor Statistics was...

Dr.

Erica McIntarfer.

Can you tell us about about her?

How long has she worked in government?

What's her background?

So like most people who lead the BLS, McIntarfur had a PhD in economics.

Joining the government statistics agencies was her first career after she finished graduate school.

Erica McIntarfur had been in government since 2002.

She spent most of her career at another statistics heavy agency, the Census Bureau.

And she was really involved in the meat and potatoes of how the government does economic statistics.

She rose through the ranks as a really notable labor economist within the Census Bureau, someone who is really focused on developing the best statistical techniques possible to gauge what it's like to be a worker in the United States, how people's careers were evolving, how policy trends were affecting people's careers.

McIntarfer also spent a couple of years at the Treasury Department and worked for both Republican and Democratic administrations through the course of her career.

She rose to the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics in 2024 when she was nominated by then President Joe Biden and confirmed by the Senate 86 to 8.

How well did she do leading BLS that first year?

People who worked with Mecintarfer throughout her career, including at BLS, said that she's really a great example of what it takes to do this job well.

She has a mix of experience that can be kind of hard to find.

She's a statistician, statistician, but she's also somebody who has experience in like communication.

Yeah, that's exactly right.

But the agency did face some criticisms during McIntyre for his tenure.

There were a couple times last year in 2024 when the agency kind of mishandled how it announces statistics.

In one case, it posted them too early.

In another case, a subgroup of people got to see them earlier than others.

And that's a really big deal because investors can win or lose millions of dollars based on how they trade right when the statistics come out.

So it's really important that nobody has any kind of time advantage or gets to see the numbers before others.

In both of those cases, the BLS said the information was released mistakenly and called for investigations.

That said, there's been really no criticism from professional economists that she mishandled the statistics themselves, that there was any shortcomings in their accuracy or any deviation from how they're normally produced.

That seems like an important distinction,

the accuracy of the numbers versus the timing of the release.

Yeah, absolutely.

And that really landed front and center because it's something that President Trump fixated on.

Trump has criticized the Bureau of Labor Statistics before.

One notable instance came last year on the campaign trail.

Then-candidate Trump accused the agency of helping the Biden administration.

He claimed that revisions to the jobs data showed that Biden and then Vice President Kamala Harris were cooking the numbers.

Professional economists really push back on that.

They say that the revisions are routine, that they can make headlines, but that recently they really haven't been any bigger than they normally are.

And people who do this for a living explain that it's just a really hard problem to make these statistics every month and to balance doing them accurately and quickly enough to get them just a couple weeks after the month that they're supposed to represent.

Are these revisions to the jobs report common?

This is standard?

Yeah, it's absolutely standard.

There's nothing uncommon or surprising about any of this.

The BLS has been, in fact, doing this the very same way for decades.

The revisions almost work like

if you're planning a wedding and you're getting RSVPs from different guests, at some point there's a deadline where you have to tell the caterer how many people are going to show up, but you might not have gotten RSVPs from all the guests yet.

And at that point, you kind of have to make your best guess about what the guests that you haven't heard from yet are going to tell you.

Oh my gosh.

You're giving me like,

I just had my wedding a couple months ago.

I'm like, oh my God, I remember how this feels.

Yes.

Okay.

So it's the same for the BLS.

The month ends and they've heard from some group of survey respondents, but not others.

And they're making their best guess about what those extra people are going to tell them when their responses come in late.

So pretty simple.

You know, if they're having beef or chicken or fish.

Exactly.

Yeah.

Friday's jobs report had a big revision and it painted a picture of a weaker economy than previously thought.

It's routine for the Labor Department to revise previous months as it gets new data, but this was a really negative revision, one that was a little bit bigger than revisions have been recently.

President Trump has fit these revisions into a narrative that he's been looking at for years now, which is a complaint that the statistics are intentionally rigged against him.

I believe the numbers were phony, just like they were before the election, and there were other times.

So, you know what I did?

I fired her.

And you know what?

I did the right thing.

And has McIntarfur or anyone from the Bureau of Labor Statistics responded to this criticism?

We've reached out to McIntarfur over the past few days.

She hasn't responded to our request for comment.

The BLS has just sort of gone about its business as it usually does.

It's provided the same amount of information about its revisions as it always has.

And from the BLS's perspective, you know, it's just business as usual.

After she was fired, McIntarfur posted on social media, saying that serving as the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics was, quote, the honor of my life.

The Friends of the Bureau of Labor Statistics is an independent organization that advocates for transparent government data, and it released a statement after McIntarfur was ousted.

It called Trump's claims of data rigging, quote, baseless and damaging.

and said that the firing of McIntarfur is without merit.

Beyond the events of the past few days, the Bureau of Labor Statistics is also facing other big challenges.

That's after the break.

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Good afternoon, and thank you so much for that wonderful introduction.

And thanks so much for the opportunity to speak here in Atlanta today.

That's Erica McIntarfer giving a speech earlier this year detailing problems and challenges at her agency.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Of course, we face real challenges at the federal level as well, which endanger much of the official data that I've been talking about today and that we currently rely on.

McIntarfer really emphasized that there are two challenges that the BLS is up against.

First of all, it costs more and more to do this work because salaries are going up and the cost of keeping up with technology is going up.

But on the other hand, they're getting less participation from the businesses and households that they need to participate in these surveys.

So most of our official data depends on surveys.

And response rates to surveys are down here in the US and worldwide.

And what has that meant for BLS and for those who rely on its data, particularly the low response rates?

So far, most economists think that the low response rates are not a serious problem to creating good statistics because

One thing that the BLS has going for it is that the size of its surveys are just huge.

To survey 60,000 households and 120,000 businesses every month, just a gigantic survey compared with the kinds of numbers that you see in a political poll, for example.

These are just much, much bigger surveys.

And so the response rate is going down, but it's starting at such a high number of respondents that so far they've sort of been able to afford taking a bit of a hit on this front.

That said, economists are really concerned that going forward, the BLS is going to have to find new ways of doing business.

So what's the upshot of these challenges for the BLS?

Well, in some places, they are having to do more guesswork.

Interestingly, that's not yet because the survey responses are down.

So far, again, their baseline surveys are so big that even with lower response rate, the guesses haven't really gotten less precise.

The one reason that they have gotten less precise so far this year is that there's a staffing shortage.

And this is a new problem that has started in 2025, which the BLS has attributed to this federal hiring freeze that President Trump put in place starting in January.

What are Outside Watchers saying about the state of the BLS, given these challenges that you've just laid out?

Does it need a revamp?

I think a lot of economists would be really frightened at the idea of a revamp because

despite the problems, the BLS has really worked the way that it's supposed to.

Yes, there are funding challenges.

There have been a few communication stumbles recently.

But economists, even from other countries, really esteem the BLS as one of the best agencies in the world at what it does.

And doing this in a really non-partisan, non-political way, there are a lot of best practices that are really deeply embedded in how the BLS does its work.

If Trump did appoint a BLS chief, which it's likely that he will, what would happen if that person then presented job numbers more in Trump's favor?

That is a huge question right now.

People who have worked at the BLS at the highest levels tell me that it would be very hard for the BLS commissioner to have any influence on the numbers under the current system.

The BLS commissioner doesn't find out what the numbers are until a couple days before they're released to the public.

Former commissioner of the BLS, William Beach,

has said that the numbers are already hard-coded into the computer system by the time the commissioner gets to see them.

So, you know, he and some of his other fellow former commissioners have said that the way the system works now, it would be very, very difficult for

the head of the BLS or anyone else in a political position at the Bureau to put their thumb on the scale.

And what will you be looking at next?

There are a lot of questions here.

Who will President Trump appoint to be the next commissioner?

How will that person handle the job?

How will they be a normal BLS commissioner as we've had for decades, or will it be a much more politicized BLS and how it communicates and how it does its business?

And Matt says the whole Bureau is now on shakier ground than at any other moment in modern history.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics has been in a gradually worsening position for a decade where they've had to do more with less.

They haven't gotten the funding that they've needed to improve their methods.

And yet they've still been doing their jobs as well as they can, as far as we can tell.

So very quickly, we moved from an agency that was sort of doing its best and persisting despite some challenges to one that is really facing a more acute situation than it's seen in decades.

That's all for today, Monday, August 4th.

The journal is a co-production of Spotify and the Wall Street Journal.

Additional reporting in this episode by Justin Layhart, Alex Leary, and Brian Schwartz.

Thanks for listening.

See you tomorrow.

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