President Donald Trump’s decision to fire the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics because he didn’t like Friday’s jobs report is a terrible idea that will undermine the public’s confidence in the government’s economic data, a former labor official said.
“It’s preposterously stupid and deeply dangerous for our economy,” Seth Harris, who served as the deputy labor secretary under former President Barack Obama, told HuffPost.
Trump said in a post on his social media platform Truth Social on Friday that he was terminating BLS Commissioner Dr. Erika McEntarfer in the middle of her term. The agency reported Friday that the economy only added a disappointing 73,000 jobs in June, which was less than expected, and revised the counts from two previous reports downward by a combined 258,000 jobs.
Trump claimed McEntarfer had “rigged” the data to make Republicans look bad, but Harris said Trump had nobody to blame for the disappointing employment numbers but himself.
“There is absolutely no chance that the BLS commissioner or anyone else at BLS manipulated the jobs and unemployment data to hurt Donald Trump politically,” said Harris, now a law professor at Northeastern University.
