President Trump said in a social media post Friday afternoon that he directed members of his administration to fire Erika McEntarfer, commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, after the BLS on Friday published a July jobs report that contained what it called “larger than normal” revisions to data from May and June.
The July jobs report published Friday morning showed the US economy added 73,000 jobs last month, fewer than expected, while the unemployment rate rose to 4.2%.
The most notable numbers to emerge from the report, however, were downward revisions to job gains in May and June, which saw 258,000 jobs taken away from what had been initially reported.
May’s job gains were revised down to 19,000 from 144,000, while June’s additions were cut to just 14,000 from the 147,000 initially reported.
In its release on Friday, the BLS said these revisions “result from additional reports received from businesses and government agencies since the last published estimates and from the recalculation of seasonal factors.”
Economists on Friday were near-unanimous in their view that July’s jobs data and the revisions to May and June reflect a labor market that is far weaker than had been suggested by recent data and characterizations by some officials, notably Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell.
“The ‘solid’ state of the labor market described by the FOMC earlier this week looks more questionable after the July employment report,” Wells Fargo senior economist Sarah House wrote in a note Friday.
Job gains over the last three months have now averaged just 35,000 after Friday’s revisions.
In his post on Friday, Trump accused McEntarfer and the BLS of reporting “faked” jobs numbers in the run-up to last year’s election, and noted February’s benchmark revision to 2024 jobs data that showed payroll growth last year was overstated by some 818,000 jobs.
“Important numbers like this must be fair and accurate, they can’t be manipulated for political purposes,” Trump said in his post on Truth Social.
“The Economy is BOOMING under ‘TRUMP’ despite a Fed that also plays games, this time with Interest Rates, where they lowered them twice, and substantially, just before the Presidential Election, I assume in the hopes of getting ‘Kamala’ elected – How did that work out? Jerome ‘Too Late’ Powell should also be put ‘out to pasture,'” Trump added.
On Wednesday, the Fed voted to keep interest rates unchanged in a range of 4.25%-4.5%. Trump has for some time called on the central bank to lower interest rates.
Earlier on Friday, two members of the Federal Reserve’s Board of Governors, Chris Waller and Michelle Bowman, both of whom voted to lower interest rates this week, issued statements outlining their views, citing downside risks to the labor market the Fed may be overlooking.
Read more: How the Fed rate decision affects your bank accounts, loans, credit cards, and investments
Waller said the Fed’s “wait and see approach is overly cautious,” noting that “downside risks to the labor market have increased.” Bowman added in her statement that the “labor market has become less dynamic and shows increasing signs of fragility.”
Following Friday’s jobs report, data from the CME Group showed traders pricing in an 80% chance the Fed cuts rates at its September meeting; on Thursday, those odds stood at just 37%.
Trump’s announcement Friday that he had directed his administration to remove McEntarfer from the BLS comes on the heels of months of speculation Trump may seek to remove Powell from his role at the Federal Reserve.
The legal hurdles to removing Powell from office are considerable, and both Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Trump himself have said they would not seek to fire Powell, whose term is set to expire next May. A flurry of reporting earlier this month suggested plans had been drawn up by the administration to remove Powell, which Trump later shot down.
Powell was first nominated as Fed chair by Trump back in 2017 and re-nominated to the post by President Biden in 2021.
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