On Aug 1, 2025, the BLS published the employment data.

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The data came out at 8:30am.

By the end of the day, the BLS Commissioner was fired.

What happened?

In the first 3 months since President Trump took office, job growth had been respectable: 102,000 in February, 120,000 in March, 158,000 in April. The 3-month moving average was 127,000 in April (Table 1).

But the latest Employment Situation Summary showed that the economy added only 73,000 jobs in July. Worse yet, revised data for the previous two months showed that job growth in May and June was much slower than originally reported: In May only 19,000 jobs were added; in June, an even scantier 14,000. All this brought down the 3-month moving average to 35,000 in July.

In January, the level of employment was 159.1 million. By July, it had risen to 159.5 million–a tepid increase of 486,000 jobs over 6 months. That works out to an average of 81,000 jobs being added per month.

So why the firing?

According to the BBC:

US President Donald Trump has fired the boss of one of America’s most important economic institutions hours after weaker-than-expected jobs data stoked further alarm about his tariff policy.

On social media Trump claimed that Erika McEntarfer, commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), had “RIGGED” jobs figures “to make the Republicans, and ME, look bad”.

A principal reason for the lackluster data was the reduction in federal government employment.

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In every month since President Trump took office, the level of employment in the federal government has fallen (Table 2). From January, when the federal government employed 3 million people, the level had fallen to 2.9 million by July – a drop of 84,000 over 5 months.

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NOTES

Data is from FRED.

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Updated: 2025-08-02

q-jobs-by-industry.qmd