Cracks in the U.S. economy appeared to emerge this morning when the Labor Department’s monthly report showed a significant slowdown in hiring. Economists suggested that a variety of factors could have contributed to the cooling, including federal job cuts, immigration crackdowns and seesawing tariff announcements.
However, President Trump implied that Erika McEntarfer, the commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, was manipulating the data for political reasons and fired her.
McEntarfer was appointed to her post by Joe Biden in 2023 and confirmed in 2024 by an overwhelmingly bipartisan vote in the Senate, after a long government career in which she served under presidents of both parties, including Trump.
Trump’s labor secretary said the firing would “ensure the American People can trust” the government’s jobs data. Others disagreed: “If you want people to stop trusting the numbers,” one economist said, “firing the person who is confirmed by the Senate to make sure those numbers are trustworthy is a real good way to do it.”
In other economic news:
Arguably the biggest news in the jobs report was two large downward revisions for May and June. Here’s why that could be a bad sign.
Trump backed off his threat of a 50 percent tariff on the African nation of Lesotho. But in this video, our Johannesburg bureau chief, John Eligon, explains how the damage has already been done.