Trump orders firing of labor stats chief after data showed jobs growth slowed

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/aug/01/trump-fires-erika-mcentarfer-labor-statistics

by throwaway5752 • 12 months ago

55 39 12 months ago

theguardian.com

NullHypothesist• 12 months ago

This is what corruption looks like.

belter3• 12 months ago

This is when a micro black hole cross the plane of the solar system, and your reality fuses with the Onion

jleyank• 12 months ago

I thought the Onion gave up as they could not come with satire anymore. People kept thinking it was real news or commentary.

taylodl• 12 months ago

This is what a dictatorship looks like.

rhelz9• 12 months ago

I'm as big of a critic of Trump as you are likely to find but......the previous jobs reports was revised DOWNWARD by over a quarter of a million jobs.

Sure, you expect the numbers to change as more data comes in. But...that's a pretty big misoverestimate. This is very problematic, as it actually MASKED some of the ill effects which Trump's policies have had.

Who knows if Trump would have actually moderated his policies if he had had a more accurate read sooner, but private companies rely on this data as well, and no doubt they have made decisions they wouldn't have if they had know the true numbers.

Trump certainly was mean-spirited in trying to frame this as a partisan issue, and downright disingenuous in some of his accusations. Nevertheless, >250,000 jobs everybody thought were there but weren't....yeah, that's a firing offense.

littlexsparkee• 12 months ago

ADP crunches the numbers too and they were more in line with the revised estimates - there was nothing preventing companies from acting on that. How can you claim this is fireable without context about how the calculations/revisions occur and their side of the story? These trade policies are engendering so much uncertainty, combined with the shakeup in the federal workforce - honestly something like this was pretty foreseeable...

belter3• 12 months ago

So they faked the numbers and then went out and...revised their fake numbers?

exceptione3• 12 months ago

the previous jobs reports was revised DOWNWARD by over a quarter of a million jobs.

I will try to be not too snarky, but imagine what would happen if the president announces tariffs every other day then changing it on the next, creating extreme volatility and uncertainty for investors. Imagine what would happen if the president threatens allies with war of conquest. If he causes the dollar to tumble while tanking the bond markets. If he daily threatens to blow up the last public instance in the US that employs a modicum of integrity and competence.

Imagine how high the pressure would have been in the past months to paint rosy pictures and suppress bad news all around. And yet people keep falling for the dumb narratives.

Imagine how difficult it is to do economic projections when inflation is not recorded anymore. Instead the US public get inflation data as vibes now, as things are probably expected to develop so badly that even the corporate media rooms might not be able to downplay it enough. People might get tired hearing of Biden's age.

The cluster fuck is all self-made. On purpose.

blackbear_6• 12 months ago

Your point is moot becase the published data also includes confidence intervals, reflecting uncertainty in the estimation. The implications of this should be clear to anybody with high school numeracy levels.

Interestingly enough, the current 90% CI for the month is about 270k jobs:

https://www.bls.gov/charts/employment-situation/otm-employme...

Note that the 250k revision includes both May and June. Is that a lot? Yes, considering that the average monthly estimation error over the past 20 years was about 51k jobs:

https://www.bls.gov/web/empsit/cesnaicsrev.htm#2024

Could have they done better? Nobody can tell after only a few hours from the announcement.

If you do have concrete and constrictive concerns about the methodology, feel free to point them out. Here's their handbook for your convenience:

https://www.bls.gov/bls/empsitquickguide.htm

anigbrowl• 12 months ago

I'm as big of a critic of Trump as you are likely to find but......the previous jobs reports was revised DOWNWARD by over a quarter of a million jobs.

OH NO....a 0.15% error (total # of jobs in the US is ~163 million). Revisions of this scale are absolutely normal and have been going on as long as I've been paying attention to job/unemployment statistics. Instead of all-caps-ing absolute numbers, did you pause to ask yourself what kind of relation these revisions have to the standard deviation? I don't understand why you'd come to a site like HN that's full of data scientists and highly numerate folk and then post 'BIG NUMBER!' as sufficient justification.

mcphage• 12 months ago

The future numbers are going to be significantly less accurate.

jauntywundrkind• 12 months ago

What flavor of corruption though?

Really enjoyed this (login only) post:

The Nazi comparisons are useful, but the Trump instinct to address negative outcomes by firing and silencing anyone on their team foolish enough to report them always makes me think of Mao and the Great Famine.

https://bsky.app/profile/joekatz45.bsky.social/post/3lvem6co...

Sure why not both? But the dogma of dear leader ism & willingness to have the facts be what they say you are, to habitually step on experts & spread distrust (using a sharpie on the hurricane predictions) is something seriously enjoying huffing it's own farts.

throwaway5752• 12 months ago

I missed https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44760734 that previously posted about this.

exceptione3• 12 months ago

The media rooms in the US will discuss this like a regular infotainment item, making it look like a normal controversy. Then it will pushed out from the news by some other circus act.

For many, this will feel like a defensible move or a minor mistake. If the public discourse is corrupted, the public will be corrupted. And so the whole house will come down, just as intended.

johntfella• 12 months ago

this opinion piece from bloomberg earlier in July comes to mind; https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2025-07-14/statis...

yakz• 12 months ago

It is the duty of the Congress to right this wrong and they will fail this test.

IAmGraydon• 12 months ago

Those who follow economic indicators know that revisions happen and always will due to the nature of how the data comes in. It is sometimes simply not possible to have all of the data before the date that the release is scheduled for.

Perhaps the dumbest thing about Trump’s dictatorial firing of the person in charge of these numbers is the fact that downward revisions work in his favor because most people don’t pay attention to them. They just pay attention to the current release. The numbers for May and June looked good when they came out and no one would have been talking about the revised had it not been for his temper tantrum.

In fact, Trump accused the Biden administration (on Truth Social) of using this as a way to hide bad numbers from the public back in August 2024 - release good numbers and quietly revise later. Now he’s claiming that it’s being used against him. What’s really going on is he knows the economic shitstorm from his idiotic tariffs is about to begin and he will need to control the narrative. Unfortunately for him, this is about to spiral way out of his ability to control.

Trump orders firing of labor stats chief after data showed jobs growth slowed

Related Stories