As soon as President Donald Trump announced that he was firing Erika McEntarfer from her job as commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the wailing and gnashing of teeth began. This was part of an “authoritarian playbook,” it was “Orwellian,” it was “preposterous.”
The correct response is, “long overdue.”
Even for government work, the BLS has been breathtakingly bad at its job, something we’ve been reporting on this space for years.
- Back in 2023, we noted that the BLS had been vastly overcounting jobs created since Joe Biden took office by as much as 77,000 a month.
- In the first five months of 2024, the BLS had exaggerated monthly job growth by a cumulative total of 250,000, we noted in July of that year.
- Between January 2023 and October 2024, the BLS’s monthly estimate of jobs created was off by a total of 684,000, we pointed out last November.
And these figures don’t count the “benchmark” revisions issued by the BLS, in which they go back and reset all the data for a year. In its latest revision, it cut the number of jobs created from April 2023 through October 2024 by 598,000.
Whether intended or not, these mistakes benefited Biden immensely. As we noted at the time, throughout the Biden administration, the press would tout the “big” job gains reported by the BLS each month, and ignore the huge downward revisions it issued later.
But the BLS hasn’t gotten any better since Trump took office. If anything, it’s gotten worse.
A review of its reports this year shows that its initial job estimates from January through June were off by a total of 693,000 jobs. It cut its estimate of jobs created in May by 109,000 and those created in June by a whopping 258,000.
This isn’t just a problem of optics. These wildly inaccurate employment numbers can have ripple effects throughout the economy, particularly if the Fed is using them to guide interest rate decisions.
The problem with Trump’s firing of McEntarfer isn’t that she didn’t deserve to be canned. It’s that by making it appear that he was doing so because of one bad monthly report, Trump has allowed the press to ignore the BLS’s terrible track record.
Reuters quoted a Trump administration official saying that: “There are these underlying problems that have been festering here for years now that have not been rectified. The markets and companies and the government need accurate data, and like, we just weren’t getting that.”
That is 100% true.
But, when National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett told NBC News that “the revisions are hard evidence” of failure, the headline NBC News put on its story was: “White House struggles to justify firing of BLS chief over weak jobs numbers.”
There is something seriously wrong with the way the BLS produces its job estimates. As our friends and Unleash Prosperity put it, “The BLS’s jobs estimates are increasingly unreliable snapshots of what is going on in the real economy. The monthly revisions shoot up and mostly way down from the initial headline numbers more than ever.”
Is it because bureaucrats are playing partisan games, as Trump is suggesting? Is it just plain incompetence?
Either way, a complete revamping of how the government collects and analyzes jobs data is desperately needed. Holding bureaucrats accountable for their glaring mistakes is a good start.
Issues & Insights was founded by seasoned journalists of the IBD Editorials page. Our mission is to provide timely, fact-based reporting and deeply informed analysis on the news of the day – without fear or favor.
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