This month’s jobs report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics was a bit of a bummer. The nonpartisan federal agency announced Friday morning that its relatively rosy forecast earlier this summer had been way off. While BLS had previously reported 291,000 new non-farm jobs in May and June, on further review, the agency concluded that number was more like 33,000. If that sounds like a big deal, it definitely is—perhaps a sign that massive cuts to government spending and employment, and a truly chaotic and possibly illegal tariff policy, are creating something less than the promised historic economic boom. It’s also exactly what you expect the BLS to release when confronted with more precise data. At a time when institutions inside and outside the government are compromising their independence to accommodate President Donald Trump, it showed that the gold standard in jobs data was still operating as it should.
That is, until Friday afternoon, when Trump responded to the poor jobs report by announcing his intention to fire Erika McEntarfer, the head of the BLS. “Important numbers like this must be fair and accurate,” he wrote on Truth Social. “[T]hey can’t be manipulated for political purposes.” Economic commentators and analysts of various political stripes condemned the move. Even the conservative businessman Kevin O’Leary told CNN that “whacking statisticians makes no sense whatsoever.”
When I say this is the kind of thing that happens in autocracies, I am not trying to be provocative. Three years ago, when Turkey’s economic statistics agency released a report showing that the country’s inflation rate was at 36 percent, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan fired the head of the agency and replaced him with a loyal ally. When it rains too much, true leaders fire the meteorologists.
When it rains too much, true leaders fire the meteorologists.
For now, the BLS is still staffed by the sort of professionals who would sooner file for unemployment themselves than fudge the unemployment numbers. But the impulsive firing seems to herald a new chapter in the president’s often delusional second term. Trump is officially in his Mad King era, demanding the impossible, lashing out at those who can’t provide it, and seeing vast conspiracies behind every setback. It is the heir to Caligula appointing his horse as consul, Empress Carlota of Mexico drinking from fountains because everything else was poison, and the Bishop of Quebec excommunicating the passenger pigeon for eating too many crops. (Well, they did eventually go away.) It is Britain banning productions of King Lear, in the twilight of George III’s reign.
But also, BLS aside, a lot of modern conservatism is kind of premised on this kind of cooking of the books (or banning them as the case may be). Trump’s attempt to intimidate the Bureau of Labor Statistics was a fitting end to a week in which his Environmental Protection Agency sought to walk back its landmark finding that greenhouse gases are a threat to public health. They are rejecting a scientific consensus, in other words, to accommodate Trump’s economic agenda. For years, Republican legislatures and administrations have worked to prohibit accurate climate science from informing environmental planning. The first seven months of his term have been defined by a purge of government health data and the people who produce it. At this point, it might as well be the ruling party’s mantra: Hear no evil, see no evil…profit?