So petty

Firing Erika McEntarfer for faking numbers is just what someone who wants to fake numbers would do.

First, please indulge my unburdening. The last 24 hours is still a blur, as it’s one of the several days where I have been pressed into service (like British seamen who woke up from a bender aboard ship to find themselves as seamen when their last waking memory was only of being a drunk landlubber) as band dads are. And not just that, but I’m a double band dad, as my youngest has entered high school to join his older brother in marching band. One of the duties of band parents is to do band booster money-raising activities, and where I live, that means going to rock concerts where we run a professional food booth at the venue.

On weekdays when this duty is mandated, I go in to work very early, put in a full day, and around 3 p.m. head to the outdoor concert venue. Then I work the booth (I’m the “nacho man”, though it would be more appropriate to call me “Nacho Libre”) until close, which is typically after 11 p.m. That means I am out of the house from around 6 a.m. until near midnight, come home, shower (because I’m disgusting) and fall dead into bed.

Last night’s concert was particularly satisfying, however. Not because I got to see it, mind you. From the food booth, I don’t really get to see anything, and barely hear the beat of the drums. Last night, it began rainy; it had rained pretty much all day. I had bought a genuine, paid ticket to the show, the cheapest, a lawn ticket beyond the shelter of the amphitheater’s roof. My youngest son showed up and got soaked, but in that, redemption came. Whatever angel who worked for the promoter walked up to the lawn before the show and offered a number of “pit” tickets to those who were the most soaked. My son scored one, and watched the show from somewhere within a few yards of the stage. My cheap ticket became one worth over $250. He had a marvelous time. I served nachos and hot dogs. I get to do it again this Saturday.

(If you ask in the comments who played, I’ll answer, but I don’t want to name them here.) Now, on to the other events of the day.

Do you know who this person is? She is a professional economist, with a Ph.D. from Virginia Polytechnic. She worked for the government, rising to the unglamorous post of the Labor Commissioner in charge of the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Her name is Erika McEnfarter. Oh, and also, President Donald Trump fired her without evidence or cause.

Photo: Department of Labor, Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons

Let me quote the POTUS 47’s Truth Social post in full, so as not to miss any nuance.

I was just informed that our Country’s “Jobs Numbers” are being produced by a Biden Appointee, Dr. Erika McEntarfer, the Commissioner of Labor Statistics, who faked the Jobs Numbers before the Election to try and boost Kamala’s chances of Victory. This is the same Bureau of Labor Statistics that overstated the Jobs Growth in March 2024 by approximately 818,000 and, then again, right before the 2024 Presidential Election, in August and September, by 112,000. These were Records — No one can be that wrong? We need accurate Jobs Numbers. I have directed my Team to fire this Biden Political Appointee, IMMEDIATELY. She will be replaced with someone much more competent and qualified. Important numbers like this must be fair and accurate, they can’t be manipulated for political purposes. McEntarfer said there were only 73,000 Jobs added (a shock!) but, more importantly, that a major mistake was made by them, 258,000 Jobs downward, in the prior two months. Similar things happened in the first part of the year, always to the negative. 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.” Thank you for your attention to this matter!

This has to be one of the most petty acts that Trump has committed in office. If I were channeling Trump, I’d say it was the pettiest act in the history of government. Not only does Trump have no evidence that McEnfarter’s numbers were cooked, he has no evidence that they were wrong in the first place. Or that the numbers the BLS revised were correct revisions.

If you have no experience running a business or doing any kind of economic reporting, you may not have even heard of the BLS. I have to deal with this in my day job, as BLS collects and reports all kinds of data on employment, which I am responsible for reporting accurately. Some companies take a while to submit reports, and others don’t respond at all. There’s a group of people who work for BLS whose entire job is to call and nag companies that don’t submit their reports, or question the numbers. And sometimes companies do cook their reporting, or simply the person assigned the task does a poor job assembling the report (as in “pencil whipped”).

The head of the BLS should be someone who is familiar with, indeed an expert in, statistical analysis and labor economics. It turns out that Erika McEnfarter has that experience, and when President Joe Biden appointed her commissioner of BLS, he was doing it because she was qualified for the job. The point here is that the BLS is not a political arm of any administration, it’s a nonpartisan data collector and reporter.

Firing someone who heads BLS because you claim that they cooked the numbers is what middle schoolers would call “whoever smelt it dealt it.” If there ever was an indication that Trump wants to fudge labor numbers, firing the person who knows how to produce accurate labor numbers, accusing her of fudging them, could not be a more obvious tell.

The BLS is not perfect. There are other sources of job reporting and statistics, including Dow Jones and payroll processor ADP. In July, BLS reported 73,000 new nonfarms jobs, which was below the 100,000 Dow Jones had estimated. It was also below BLS’s own projections, which were revised down from 147,000 for June and 144,000 in July, to 14,000 and 19,000 respectively. That was a big swing, and I’m sure it represented a bit of a shocker to the folks who work for BLS, as they assembled actual data from economic projections.

Do you know how hard it is, as an economist, to project any kind of large-scale figure, like job growth, when the guy who has a giant lever labeled “tariffs” keeps jerking on it like a cocaine-addicted monkey conditioned to pull the blue lever to get another fix? It’s hard. Companies make hiring decisions based on their own projections, and their own business constraints. Nobody is going to hire a bunch of manufacturing or distribution workers when they don’t know what it will cost to make the widget or resell it if it happens to come from a country where the barrel of Trump’s tariff blunderbuss is pointed. What we’re seeing in the numbers shift is the inevitable result of uncertainty.

Uncertainty is the enemy of projections, and it was Trump’s own actions that made the BLS projections into a heap of trash. It was a professional economist specializing in econometrics (the study of linking economic theory to actual data and statistics) who went with the numbers and where they led. Trump fired the professional because he wants someone who will report whatever numbers he likes. The only result of that will be nobody believing BLS numbers anymore.

I don’t want to say that BLS is infallible—again they are not perfect. And they are not completely insulted from political issues. In 2023, the House Budget Committee took the Biden administration to task for publishing misleading job creating numbers. BLS is responsible for tracking the labor participation rate, which sets the number of workers who are willing to work in the labor pool. This affects all kinds of statistics and projections, as we need to know how many workers there are to understand who is employed and who is unemployed. The chief economist for the Heritage Foundation, E.J. Antoni pushed the theory that post-COVID calculations artificially inflated job numbers, allowing the Biden team to claim a lower unemployment rate. It’s likely true that some after COVID, there was some political massaging of unemployment figures, and BLS was involved in that.

But COVID was a major disruptor, and millions of Americans were on various forms of unemployment, many getting $600 per week pandemic payments from the federal government. Setting the actual labor participation rate during and after COVID is not a task for the fainthearted. Trump’s own BLS commissioner, William Beach, who headed the agency during COVID, said it was not possible to “rig” job numbers in the way Trump claimed. He agreed that the result of McEnfarter’s firing would be a loss of confidence in BLS reporting, not better numbers.

“I think damage has been done, even if it's the best possible person,” Beach said, referring to the next person who runs the agency. “There will be a time in the next, you know, year or two or so when the number comes in really low and we'll all say, ‘well, you know, it was probably lower, but the commissioner had an influence on those numbers.’ Now I won't say that because I know the staff, the loyal Americans who work there, and people who have deep knowledge about the system won't say that, but most Americans trust the president and they say, ‘Well, the president says it’s cooked, it's cooked.’”

I agree with Beach, and also agree with his caveat that the president has the full right to appoint who he wants in the position. But the pettiness of the action, and the purported reason for it, is totally damaging to the office’s function. Quoting Beach again:

The other part of it, so that the numbers could be accurate, says that there is a huge role to play by the commissioner in the formation of those numbers, and that's the part that is not correct.

That’s right, in a normally functioning BLS, the commissioner does not play a huge role in the formation of the numbers. However the person running BLS does play a role in ensuring the system is accurate, and that the numbers are statistically valid. Again, “whoever smelt it dealt it.” Trump fired McEnfarter not because he didn’t believe the numbers were accurate (though he might convince himself of that enough to fool a polygraph), but because Trump wants a commissioner who is willing to publish cooked numbers and play a huge role in the formation of the numbers.

Trump wants a toady, just like he appoints in every role that affects his presidency.

Those who don’t believe that the next BLS commissioner will be a toady are buying Trump watches. Whoever comes in next will probably gut the agency, and whatever competent economists and statisticians working there who value the accuracy of their work will find other places of employment, or take early retirement, or be forced out. But the numbers will crank along, and whatever comes out of that particular sausage machine won’t bear much resemblance to reality if reality isn’t to Trump’s liking.

It was so petty.

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