President Trump on Friday fired Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) Commissioner Erika McEntarfer, a Biden appointee whom he accused of political bias, “inaccuracies,” and “incompetence.” The firing came hours after the BLS released its monthly “employment situation summary,” which showed poor employment growth throughout May, June, and July.

The U.S. economy added only an estimated 73,000 jobs in July, the BLS reported. Furthermore, the BLS estimated that the economy created 258,000 fewer jobs in May and June than previously estimated. It now estimates that the economy added 19,000 jobs in May, instead of the previously estimated 144,000, and only 14,000 in June, instead of the previously estimated 147,000 jobs. The BLS acknowledged that these revisions were “larger than normal.”

The massive downward revisions likely caused Trump to reflect back on last August, when the BLS revised its employment estimate downward by a staggering 818,000 jobs over the period between March 2023 and March 2024. At the time, Trump called the overestimate a “massive scandal” and accused the “Harris-Biden administration” of “fraudulently manipulating Job Statistics to hide the true extent of the Economic Ruin they have inflicted upon America.”

On Monday, Trump drew an explicit connection between the two overestimates and subsequent downward revisions, declaring that “Last weeks Job’s Report was RIGGED, just like the numbers prior to the Presidential Election were Rigged. That’s why, in both cases, there was massive, record setting revisions, in favor of the Radical Left Democrats.”

(Trump’s memory of the 2024 incident seems to be fuzzy; in 2024, the overestimate favored the incumbent Democratic administration, while the August revision, two months before the election, favored the challenger, Trump. With Trump now in the White House, the political benefit of the downward revision is reversed.)

Trump and his allies accused McEntarfer of political disloyalty, alleging that she was cooking the books to favor Democrats. “All over the U.S. government, there have been people who have been resisting Trump everywhere they can,” argued National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett. “To make sure that the data are as transparent and as reliable as possible, we’re going to get highly qualified people in there that have a fresh start and a fresh set of eyes on the problem.”

Regardless of the truth of the allegations, McEntarfer did little to dispel them by posting about her removal on Bluesky, a social media platform that largely exists as a censorious, leftist alternative to X.

Trump’s firing of McEntarfer was poorly received. Former BLS Commissioner William Beach, whom President Trump appointed during his first term in office, called the firing of McEnterfer “totally groundless.” National Review’s Philip Klein wrote that it was “hard to see how this helps Trump.” If the BLS issues good reports, Trump’s opponents can dismiss them as politically compromised, he reasoned. If it issues bad reports, Trump’s opponents can point out that even “Trump’s hand-picked commissioner released numbers showing that the economy is lousy.”

Of course, truly understanding the issue requires more than merely reading what other people think.

Broadly speaking, the BLS is the government’s “principal fact-finding agency in the broad field of labor economics and statistics.” Situated within the Department of Labor, it collects and analyzes data on “major economic indicators,” as well as more specific reports.

The BLS work products most Americans are familiar with are the monthly inflation report (the “consumer price index”) and the monthly jobs report (the “employment situation”). These are accessible because jobs and prices are accessible concepts that are relevant to every American. But the BLS puts out far more reports that the average American can — or should — read.

The economic indicators that the BLS reviews monthly include the consumer price index (CPI), the producer price index (PPI), the employment situation, the employment cost index, productivity and costs, real earnings, and import and export price indexes. Each report breaks its information down according to industry, geographic region, demographic information, and other variables.

Admittedly, this list of reports hits like a monotone professor listing out the Latin names for every species he knows. So, it may be necessary at this point for some readers to unglaze their eyes, shake themselves awake, or sip their coffee.

The point is, much of the BLS work consists of sifting through tons of economic data to produce in-the-weeds economic reports that are largely of interest to macroeconomists, investors, particular industries, and a handful of policymakers.

Even with this niche assignment, the BLS still finds plenty of work to do. Just as a sample, here is the BLS’s schedule for published releases in August:

• 8/1 Employment situation — July 2025
• 8/7 Productivity and costs — Second Quarter 2025
• 8/12 Consumer Price Index — July 2025
• 8/12 Real Earnings — July 2025
• 8/13 State Job Openings and Labor Turnover — July 2025
• 8/14 Producer Price Index — July 2025
• 8/15 U.S. Import and Export Price Indexes — July 2025
• 8/19 State Employment and Unemployment (Monthly) — July 2025
• 8/21 Summer Youth Labor Force — Annual 2025
• 8/26 Number of Jobs, Labor Market Experience, Marital Status, and Health for those Born 1957-1964 — Biennial
• 8/27 Metropolitan Area Employment and Unemployment (Monthly) — July 2025
• 8/28 Employment Projections and Occupational Outlook Handbook — Annual 2024-2034

Every man has his own taste, and there may be a few statistical nerds out there who find the BLS’s work positively riveting (this is likely a necessity for working there). Yet even I, with a graduate degree in economics, admittedly struggle to describe much of what the BLS does as anything other than “boring.”

Why does it matter then? The BLS performs an important function by compiling macro-level measurements (or rather, estimates of measurements) of the U.S. economy. To seek analogues in more familiar fields of study, the BLS’s various reports are timing the pulse or taking the temperature of the U.S. economy.

Occasionally, these routine measurements detect changing economic conditions that demand a different diagnosis or prescription. At these moments (such as when inflation skyrocketed in 2021-2022), BLS reports give the bureau brief political relevance before it fades back into obscurity, where it functions best.

The fundamental challenge the BLS faces is that its instruments and measurements are far less precise, accurate, or even direct than those of medical science. For instance, to measure employment in the U.S. economy, the BLS asks businesses how many employees they have. It then tries to compile the answers, guesses, and round figures it receives into something resembling a preliminary estimate. (The BLS employment survey had a 60% response rate before COVID, which has since dropped to 43%.) Based on more reliable data on business activity that is available only months after the fact, the BLS frequently revises its original estimate — hence the downward revisions in job numbers.

Additionally, America’s free market system does not give the government access to every economic transaction. Sometimes, the BLS must rely on “proxy” measurements — measuring something incidental to what it cares about, like the Pentagon Pizza Report — to obtain a sketch of the economy.

Thus, the BLS’s measurement tools are less like a thermometer — stick it in and check the temperature — and more like a pilot relying on his instruments to navigate through thick fog. Their use of proxy indicators might be compared to navigating through a hall of mirrors, where finding the truth relies on correctly interpreting the various reflected images.

But perhaps the most accurate analogy of the BLS’s function is that of someone sitting in the back seat of a station wagon, looking out the rear window, directing a blindfolded driver by describing what they have passed along the road. The BLS neither makes policy nor reads the future. It can only describe the present by measuring the past as it hurtles by at full speed.

“Today, ‘Just the Facts’ is a core BLS value,” their website claims. “If asked, ‘Is the glass half empty or half full?’ At BLS, we see an 8-ounce glass containing 4 ounces.” The BLS leaves policy judgments to others, but collecting the facts is hard enough.