President Donald Trump learned the hard way Friday morning that firing the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics doesn’t change the facts: the economy is cooling, the unemployment rate is going up, and the number of job openings isn’t keeping pace.
The U.S. economy added just 22,000 jobs in August, less than economists had expected.
Friday morning’s jobs report found the unemployment rate had risen very slightly 4.3%, up from 4.2% in July. The number of unemployed people was up by about 150,000 from just over 7.2 million in July to nearly 7.4 million in August. And employment in Trump’s pet industries — the ones he pledged his support for on the campaign and has continued to claim his policies support — including mining, oil and gas, and manufacturing, is down.
The BLS is also counting federal employees who took the DOGE buy-out offer and are still collecting a severance, which means there could be tens of thousands more unemployed people who aren’t showing up on the rolls quite yet. Those ex-workers will be paid through at least the end of this month.
Trump in August fired BLS Commissioner Erika McEntarfer after the July jobs report signaled a slowing jobs market, and larger-than-normal revisions for May and June suggested a more significant economic downturn could be looming, experts told TPM at the time.
This month’s revisions showed a further decline: between June and July’s adjustments, employment was 21,000 lower than previously reported.
The August employment situation survey mirrors data released Wednesday in the the Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey, which showed the number of unemployed people surpassed the number of job openings for the first time in four years, Axios reported.
Black women’s employment has taken an especially big hit, likely because of Trump’s attack on federal government workers who are disproportionately Black. Black women lost 319,000 jobs between February and July, according to an analysis by gender economist Katica Roy. Over the same period, white women gained 142,000 jobs, Hispanic women 176,000 and and white men 365,000. The August jobs report shows Black people are the only group whose unemployment rate has risen steadily since April.
Ahead of the jobs report, the Friends of the Bureau of Labor Statistics released an eight-page explainer outlining how BLS statisticians compile the jobs report, explaining how revisions work, and highlighting that data from the agency can still be trusted — for now.
“The biggest immediate risk is from severe understaffing,” the explainer says.
“Longer term, continued attacks on BLS’s independence and budgets that compromise
technical excellence would undermine BLS’s credibility,” the Friends of the BLS wrote later in the report.
When Trump fired McEntarfer, statisticians, economists and other researchers sharply criticized the president’s decision and echoed to TPM warnings about maintaining the independence of the agency.
But Trump administration officials have said out loud they have no concern for agency independence. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick called the idea “nonsense” when talking to a group of federal statisticians.
“As best as humanly possible with as many tools as possible, get the right answer,” Lutnick reportedly said in August. “So independence is nonsense. Okay, accuracy is the only word that matters.”
While the commissioner is currently the only politically appointed position at the agency, the Trump administration has moved to reclassify some federal employees and make them easier to fire.
At the same time, the administration maintained that the rigorous process under which BLS stats are collected, analyzed and reported meant that the data would remain free from political interference, at least in the short term. When firing McEnterfar, the president highlighted the July jobs report revisions and said he felt the negative economic information was designed to hurt him politically, something experts told TPM was impossible given the nature of how data was collected and reported.
Soon after her ouster, Trump nominated conservative economist E.J. Antoni to head the agency. Antoni, the chief economist at the Heritage Foundation, has floated the idea of pausing the monthly jobs report altogether. Economists from progressive and conservative thinktanks lambasted his nomination, denouncing his perceived lack of qualifications and apparent lack of understanding about some basic economic principles.
Experts told TPM large revisions usually signal something is happening in the economy. The jobs report is produced using a survey of employers. Larger and more stable employers are more likely to return their surveys on time, reflected in the initial round of numbers reporting, while smaller and struggling firms are more likely to return their surveys late. Large downward revisions make sense, experts told TPM, if firms are feeling stretched and missing the BLS survey deadline.
Still, groups like the Friends of the BLS have long tried to raise awareness about the need for increased agency funding and survey method updates.
“I think it’s important to understand that the agency has been wanting to modernize for a long time,” former BLS Commissioner Erica Groshen told TPM in late August. “But this is a particularly fraught time for the agency because its budget has been severely constrained over the past 15 years, so its ability to be modernized has been limited at the same time as responses are falling.”
The Friends of the BLS then published a statement urging senators to consider a list of qualifications the next BLS chief should have ahead of Antoni’s confirmation. He’s expected to appear for a hearing before the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee some time in September.
