President Donald Trump’s history of criticizing the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ jobs report has surfaced in the wake of his decision to fire commissioner Erika McEntarfer on Friday.
Trump’s public frustrations with the economics and statistics agency appear to date back to his 2016 presidential campaign. “Don’t believe those phony numbers,” then-candidate Trump said in his New Hampshire victory speech during his first campaign for the White House.
Last August, Trump claimed without evidence that former President Joe Biden’s administration was “caught fraudulently manipulating” job statistics, when the agency publicly disclosed that the economy created fewer than 818,000 jobs between April of 2023 and March of 2024 than initial estimates suggested.
“There’s never been any revision like this,” Trump said at a campaign rally in North Carolina on Aug. 21, 2024. “They wanted it to come out after the election, but somehow it got leaked,” he claimed at the time.
Dr. Erika McEntarfer, Commissioner of Labor Statistics.
Bureau of Labor Statistics
Trump did not provide evidence that the information publicly disclosed by the agency was leaked.
Then-Labor Secretary Julie Su in November 2024 defended the figures, and also suggested the numbers were impacted by Hurricane Helene’s impact on the southeastern United States, and labor strikes.
“The labor market remains very strong, and this shows what happens when you have a president and a vice president who are fighting for workers every single day,” Su said at the time.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) uses several surveys for estimating employment levels in the U.S. and revisions are common. Every monthly Jobs Report has a blurb at the end that updates the figures from the previous two months based on new data.
President Donald Trump walks to board Marine One to depart for New Jersey, at the White House in Washington, Aug. 1, 2025.
Jonathan Ernst/Reuters
The revision that Trump was referencing was made public on Aug. 21, and updated with final figures in February 2025, according to the BLS website.
The same downward revisions also took place during Trump’s first term, under then-BLS commissioner William W. Beach. The agency determined 518,000 fewer jobs were created in March 2019 than it had initially reported.
Alternatively, Trump had no complaints about the jobs report produced under McEntarfer — a Biden appointee — right before the 2024 election, which showed the U.S. gained 12,000 jobs in October.
The then-candidate referenced the low numbers while criticizing the Biden-Harris administration at a rally in Milwaukee.
“They did 12,000 jobs,” Trump said to boos at the rally on Nov. 1. “It’s hundreds of thousands of jobs less than it should be,” he added.
Trump was also quick to embrace the jobs reports as president — when they were favorable.
In March 2017 — when the Bureau of Labor Statistics announced that the economy added 235,000 jobs the prior month — then-Press Secretary Sean Spicer said Trump had full faith in the positive report, despite calling it “phony” in the past.
“I talked to the president prior to this and he said to quote him very clearly: ‘They may have been phony in the past, but it’s very real now,'” Spicer said to reporters at the time.
Trump’s decision to fire McEntarfer on Friday came after the report found the U.S. had added 73,000 jobs in July, according to data from the BLS. The figure marked a slowdown from 147,000 jobs added in the previous month.
President Donald Trump speaks to the media as he departs the White House, Aug. 1, 2025 in Washington.
Win McNamee/Getty Images
The unemployment rate ticked up to 4.2%, keeping it at near-historic lows, according to the report.
The report provided new estimates for two previous months, significantly dropping the government’s estimate of jobs added in May and June. The fresh data indicated a notable slowdown in hiring as Trump’s tariffs took hold over recent months.
Trump criticized McEntarfer over the revisions, saying without evidence that the revisions suggested jobs statistics had been “manipulated.”
ABC News has reached out to McEntarfer for a comment.
The Trump administration described the downward revisions as an unwelcome sign for the U.S. economy but did not dispute the data. “Obviously, they’re not what we want to see,” Stephen Miran, chair of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, said on Friday morning.
Asked by reporters as he departed the White House on Friday about the reason for McEntarfer’s firing, Trump said he believes the economy is doing well and claimed the latest jobs numbers were “phony.”
“I believe the numbers were phony just like they were before the election, and there were other times,” Trump said, pointing to a previous revision in the jobs numbers last year that he claimed, without evidence, was an attempt to benefit Democrats heading into the election. He said this despite using the numbers as a talking point in his campaign.
“So you know what I did? I fired her. And you know what? I did the right thing,” Trump said.
