Days after President Trump fired Bureau of Labor Statistics chief Erika McEntarfer, a Biden appointee who repeatedly released bad data on jobs creation with big revisions afterward, the establishment left continues to howl about President Trump.
It's like they like the bad data.
Here's Larry Summers making the television rounds, defending the indefensible:
Larry Summers on Trump firing the BLS Commissioner:
— The Post Millennial (@TPostMillennial) August 3, 2025
"This is the stuff of democracies giving way to authoritarianism. Firing statisticians goes with threatening the heads of newspapers, it goes with launching assaults on universities..." pic.twitter.com/bqW96d9ah4
Now writer Don Surber has discovered a doozy of a BLS internal report from 2024, reported by Bloomberg News, that the agency has been mismanaging data up the wazoo.
According to Bloomberg:
The US Bureau of Labor Statistics is “not sufficiently focused” on how it disseminates key economic data and a revamp of the agency’s culture is required, according to a report commissioned after a series of botched releases.
The Labor Department, which oversees the BLS, ordered the independent review to examine “procedures and practices for the equitable and timely provision of data to the public.” The findings of the 60-day external review were published Tuesday and included a number of recommendations to improve processes and communications.
“We have already begun the work of turning the team’s recommendations into a roadmap to recommit our agency to data security and equitable access to data,” BLS Commissioner Erika McEntarfer said on a call Tuesday.
Well, she didn't.
This corresponds pretty well to the problems President Trump cited on the day he gave her the boot:
Trump fires BLS commissioner, Erika McEntarfer pic.twitter.com/5opgVmP7iQ
— zerohedge (@zerohedge) August 1, 2025
Note that he didn't object to the data itself, as Summers and his buddies claimed; he objected to the constant revisions of the data, big, unprecedented revisions, released at politically sensitive times, always good for the Democrats and always bad for the Republicans, pretty well nullifying the purpose of collecting data at all.
She also said she'd have the problems under control -- and she didn't, so out she went.
The Bloomberg report is more disturbing than just major revisions of data that Trump cited.
Deep in the Bloomberg story, there are doings like this:
The report was commissioned after several incidents around data releases raised questions about how some of the world’s most sensitive economic information gets disseminated. In August, the BLS provided at least three Wall Street firms with highly anticipated figures on revisions to US payrolls — all while the official release was delayed on its website.
The episode not only sparked outrage among investors but also on Capitol Hill, where key Senate Republicans charged the BLS with its “continued failures” in producing crucial economic data and demanded answers to questions around its data release protocols.
Other incidents earlier in the year raised similar concerns. In May, the BLS inadvertently published inflation data a half hour before the scheduled release time, and separately a BLS economist disclosed internal data to an exclusive group of analysts he described as “super users.”
BLS claimed innocent human error around these releases of data to insiders first instead of everyone, but nobody believes that. Billions of dollars of trades are on the line and equal access to data is ingrained in every player, government and traders, ever since Wall Street began. Any uneven release of data is inside trading, and release of data to privileged cronies over others is politicization of data.
Which is where Trump had the problem. The woman promised to reform her data mishandling, which stretches way back, and she went right back to business as usual, manipulating the data for political purposes in a variety of ways.
Economics powerhouse Alan Reynolds found these problems, too:
Aside from notoriously lagged and mismeasured rent and BLS made-up figures for "Owners' Equivalent Rent," inflation was generally negligible or negative since July 2022 even as habitual Fed hawks and vultures (such as Larry Summers) kept warning repeatedly that it was about to… https://t.co/JYmKdmVlk2 pic.twitter.com/JyJXUOuUyz
— AlanReynoldsEcon (@AlanReynoldsEcn) January 27, 2024
It's possible she turned to erratic revised and made up releases in response to no longer being able to release data to cronies. It would be interesting to know if her net worth has grown suddenly as it does for many on Capitol Hill.
The bottom line is that Trump saw right through it. He put a stop to it. Now maybe the markets can function again as they are supposed to.
Thank you, President Trump.
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