Let me establish right here and now that I’m never happy when someone loses their job, no matter who it is or what particular circumstances may have lead to it. Unlike certain fascist farters who have built their “brand” upon it, the words “you’re fired” do nothing but further upset my ever-churning stomach.
That said, I still cannot quite bring myself to the point where I’m considering Erika McEntarfer as Anerica’s latest and greatest martyr. You might not know her name off the top of your head but I’m pretty sure you know her story lest you’ve been otherwise fully distracted for the past few days. Since I do realize some of you actually are still well off enough to take a mid-summer vacation, allow FORTUNE’s Emma Hinchcliffe to bring you up to speed:
President Donald Trump was unhappy with July’s U.S. jobs report, which showed hiring slowing (with 73,000 jobs added, compared to 100,000 predicted) and revised past months’ numbers. The Wall Street Journal called the results “surprisingly dismal.” So, on Friday Trump said he would fire the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Erika McEntarfer.
McEntarfer was nominated to lead the BLS in 2023. At the time, it was an overwhelmingly non-controversial appointment. She was confirmed 86-8 in a bipartisan vote.
She’s a longtime labor economist with more than 20 years experience in the federal government, who had worked at the Census Bureau’s Center for Economic Studies, the Treasury Department’s Office of Tax Policy and the White House Council of Economic Advisers in a nonpolitical role. Her research focused on job loss, retirement, worker mobility, and wage rigidity, according to the AP.
In other words, a fellow researcher. And someone whose greatest apparent crime was to make her boss upset by producing numbers that they didn’t wish to see.
Her boss being the impossibly oversensitive, ironically thin-skinned and massively petty infant that he is, he has continued to throw McEntrarfer and the data she signed off on under the bus virtually non-stop, continuing his mastery of Roy Cohn’s life mantra into yesterday, as BUSINESS INSIDER’s Brent Griffiths reported:
President Donald Trump isn’t backing down from his controversial firing of the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics after a disappointing jobs report. “It is antiquated, but it is also very political,” Trump said about the position Tuesday morning on CNBC’s “Squawk Box.” “So, look, it is a highly political situation. It is totally rigged. Smart people know it. People with common sense know it, and a lot of people like to keep their heads under the covers,” Trump said.
Well, other smart people are rising up and hoisting McEntrafer’s torso up on their shoulders in the wake of her public decapitation. At least the office and the legacy she represents. Here’s how Griffiths continued:
William Beach, a former Commissioner of Labor Statistics during Trump’s first term, has been a vocal critic of Trump’s decision. Beach, who now works as an economist, has said that commissioners have little actual sway over the jobs numbers, which are already finished before they reach their desks. “The totally groundless firing of Dr. Erika McEntarfer, my successor as Commissioner of Labor Statistics at BLS, sets a dangerous precedent and undermines the statistical mission of the Bureau,” Beach wrote on X on Friday.
And Hinchcliffe tossed out the always inflammatory misoygny card in her “analysis”:
McEntarfer joins a growing list of female officials fired during Trump 2.0 (and lot of fired men, too). There was Admiral Linda Fagan, the leader of the Coast Guard and the first woman to lead a military branch who was removed on Trump’s second day back on the job. Gwynne Wilcox, who Trump attempted to dismiss from the National Labor Relations Board (she sued, and a back-and-forth over her dismissal reached the Supreme Court). Federal Elections Committee (FEC) chair Ellen Weintraub was let go. Phyllis Fong, inspector general of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, refused to comply with her firing in January and was escorted out by security. Carla Hayden, the Librarian of Congress, was fired via email.
But being that proverbial blind squirrel we’ve been rapidly turning into the latest avatar for Fat Orange Jesus, while his conclusions of “rigging” are of course thorough bullsh-t the afterthoughts on the data itself being a problem is, sorry to tell you, fairly spot on. Take it from someone who has spent the better part of his professional life concerned with such otherwise trivial matters.
I’ve dealt with a legacy company continuing to rely upon antiquated and inefficient ways to gather data and then trying to pass them off as gospel for decades. That company is named Nielsen. My colleagues who had larger staffs and budgets would dedicate staff members to regular analysis of the integrity of the sample and whenever they’d see some uncomfortable variances from their expectations they’d call their representatives in for come-to-Jesus confrontations to discuss their findings. Being the good corporate soldiers that they were they often let me sit in on those meetings, sometimes throwing in some of my own lower hanging fruit discoveries about the results that had my boss bitching and moaning–enough to repeatedly urge me to plan some sort of stealth attack on Nielsen’s Oldsmar, Florida headquarters.
So I took note when a pretty damn smart observer in his own right just happened to weigh in on CNBC earlier this week with some of his own informed reality checks on exactly what has been happening on McEntrarfer’s–and one could conclude Beach’s–respective watches. Per WEB PRO BUSINESS’ Tim Toole:
In the high-stakes world of economic policymaking, where decisions hinge on the precision of data, renowned economist Jeremy Siegel has ignited a fierce debate over the reliability of U.S. government statistics. During a recent appearance on CNBC’s “Squawk Box,” Siegel, a professor emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School and chief economist at WisdomTree, lambasted the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) for what he sees as systemic failures in collecting and reporting jobs data.
Siegel didn’t mince words, highlighting how the BLS’s reliance on voluntary surveys with plummeting response rates—now as low as 60% for key employment metrics—has led to inaccurate readings of the economy. “The response rate is down to 60%. That’s unacceptable for the most important statistic we have,” he stated in the CNBC interview. This critique echoes longstanding concerns among economists, but Siegel’s prominence has amplified the issue, especially as the data discrepancies directly influenced Federal Reserve actions. He argued that had the Fed known the true extent of labor market weakness earlier, a rate cut in July would have been inevitable, potentially averting market volatility.
The core of Siegel’s criticism centers on the BLS’s methodology, which depends on surveys sent to about 400,000 firms. These are not mandatory, and without strict deadlines, responses trickle in late—sometimes weeks after initial reports. This delay, Siegel contends, creates a distorted picture, as seen in the July report’s revisions that erased nearly 260,000 jobs from May and June estimates, marking one of the largest such adjustments since 1979, excluding the COVID era. Moreover, Siegel pointed to the JOLTS (Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey) report, where response rates have plunged to 20%—less than half pre-COVID levels. “COVID is over. We can’t keep using it as an excuse,” he said on CNBC.
We would have conniptions if Nielsen in-tab rates fell below 90 per cent in key demographic cells. And yes, I’m including the era where local market measurement was determined in similar manners to the surveys that Siegel has now revealed that BLS has stubbornly used as the backbone for their crucial conclusions. BLS has maintained a regular delivery schedule of delivering these economic indicators early in a calendar month come hell or high water because so much rides on the release of these numbers–as numerous business reporters have described it, it’s an adrenaline rush akin to what I’d experience in pre-dawn hours after a well-publicized premiere.
But say what you will about Nielsen–and one could go on ad infinitum if one were so inclined–when the response rates were that egregiously off, they’d withhold the release of the data, even if it frustrated the heck out of the reporters that covered that beat, let alone the screaming executives we’d answer into. That would at least have provided a needed caveat or asterisk for whatever did get eventually shared–sometimes only privately in the case of some syndicated reports. Nielsen’s fine print has always referenced data as “estimates”. Apparently the use of that word in this case has been glossed over by pretty much everyone involved until now.
I assume that McEntarfer and her predecessors had their own staffs of lieutenants in the trenches who were responsible for watchdogging this process. I’d like to hope they at least took as detailed a look at any findings as I did, let alone my even more invested colleagues. Since nowhere in any of the reports or defenses that we’ve seen since the latest Trump tantrum have any such reference, perhaps that confidence could be unfounded.
As Toole’s report added, Siegel certainly raised some viable questions that whatever toady winds up in the role should at least be prepared to tackle:
Siegel advocates for mandatory surveys with time limits to boost response rates and transparency. “Why wasn’t there an explanation for the biggest mistake in 50 years?” he questioned on CNBC, demanding accountability. He rejects claims of political rigging—countering Trump’s assertions that numbers were manipulated against him—but insists the BLS must modernize in an era of instant data via the internet.
We demanded the same things from Nielsen, let alone other vendors we’d bring it to conduct surveys which we often designed the RFPs and questionnaire structure for ourselves. Admittedly a scant few of us had degrees from Wharton, but we made damn sure we’d weigh in before we’d share our results wider. Sure sounds like someone like Siegel–if not himself–might be open to a behind-the-scenes consultancy. I can personally point to a couple of dozen auspiced runners-up who could at least bring some chops to the table going forward, starting with the one that I’m seeing through bleary eyes in the mirror.
One can only hope in the wake of all of this attention McEntrarfer has learned some valuable lessons, or at the very least might eventually address some of Siegel’s claims on her own behalf–or those of her now former colleagues. If you see something say something, assuming you were indeed watching closely enough in the first place. Assuming she did, at least in my mind, no harm, no foul. If not–well, maybe THAT was the straw that broke a particular camel’s back.
I’m fairly confident that given how much rallying to her cause we’ve seen, let alone her decades of experience, that McEntrafer will not need a GoFundMe any time soon. Even relatively diminished skill sets have value in the research world at large. She might even want to reach out to Nielsen. They could still use some help.
Until next time…