The American Spectator | USA News and Politics
"As to Erika McEntarfer, most voters had never heard of her until this weekend, and very few will lose sleep because she has become suddenly unemployed. Indeed, most of the people who voted for Trump in 2024 will be thinking, “Why didn’t he fire her in January?' ”
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| Broc Smith toon added by TD |
"The corporate news media greeted the lackluster jobs report that dropped on August 1 with unabated glee, and savored President Trump’s complaints concerning its accuracy. They were less pleased, however, when he fired Commissioner of Labor Statistics Erika McEntarfer. The coverage of her termination was predictable. CNN, for example, went with the following headline: “Trump fires a senior official over jobs numbers.” In reality, McEntarfer’s termination was long overdue. She was a Biden appointee whose tenure at the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) has been characterized by disarray.
"Her leadership of the BLS involved implausibly robust job growth estimates during former President Biden’s final year in office and recurring technical issues. The Washington Post reluctantly ran this story: “The Bureau of Labor Statistics said Wednesday that a technical issue caused delays last week in the scheduled release of jobs data … The episode is at least the third in a series of missteps this year.” McEntarfer’s tenure was also plagued with huge downward revisions in reported job gains. As the New York Times reported in August of 2024:
On Wednesday, the Labor Department said monthly payroll figures overstated job growth by roughly 818,000 in the 12 months that ended in March. That suggests employers added about 174,000 jobs per month during that period, down from the previously reported pace of about 242,000 jobs — a downward revision of about 28 percent … The updated numbers are the latest sign of vulnerability in the job market, which until recently had appeared rock solid despite months of high interest rates and economists’ warnings of an impending recession.
"This gigantic downward revision was not merely the second largest on record, it doesn’t include normal monthly revisions. When those adjustments are added, McEntarfer’s BLS leadership appears either incompetent or corrupt. As the Daily Caller reported at the time, “Including monthly revisions, the Biden administration overstated the number of jobs in the U.S. economy by 1.18 million in the year through March, accounting for approximately 36 percent of the 3.24 million jobs initially claimed.” The legacy media have made much of President Trump’s claim that the job numbers are rigged, but McEntarfer’s record hardly rules it out.
"Inevitably, the soporific Sunday morning news programs highlighted Trump’s skepticism about the accuracy of the BLS report. On Meet the Press, moderator Kristen Welker insisted that White House economic adviser Kevin Hassett produce concrete evidence that the numbers were rigged." . . .
Is The BLS Corrupt, Or Just Hopelessly Incompetent? – Issues & Insights ..."Even for government work, the BLS has been breathtakingly bad at its job, something we’ve been reporting on this space for years.
- Back in 2023, we noted that the BLS had been vastly overcounting jobs created since Joe Biden took office by as much as 77,000 a month.
- In the first five months of 2024, the BLS had exaggerated monthly job growth by a cumulative total of 250,000, we noted in July of that year.
- Between January 2023 and October 2024, the BLS’s monthly estimate of jobs created was off by a total of 684,000, we pointed out last November.
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