The story of President Donald Trump to criticize the job report of the Office of Labor Statistics has arisen following his decision to set the commissioner Erika Mtientfer on Friday.
Trump’s public frustrations with the economy and statistics agency seem to date back to their 2016 presidential campaign. “Do not create those false numbers,” said the then candidate Trump in his New Hampshire victory speech during his first campaign for the White House.
Last August, Trump said without evidence that the administration of former President Joe Biden was “trapped fraudulently manipulating the work statistics”, when the agency publicly revealed that the economy created less than 818,000 jobs between April 2023 and March 2024 that suggested initial estimates.
“There has never been any review like this,” Trump said in a campaign rally in North Carolina on August 21, 2024. “They wanted him to leave after the elections, but somehow he leaked,” he said at that time.
Dr. Erika Mtntarfer, Commissioner of Labor Statistics.
Labor Statistics Office
Trump did not provide evidence that the information disclosed publicly by the agency leaked.
The then secretary of the Julie Laboratory in November 2024 defended the figures, and also suggested that the numbers were affected by the impact of Hurricane Helene in the southeast of the United States and labor attacks.
“The labor market is still very strong, and this shows what happens when you have a president and a vice president fighting for workers every day,” he said at that time.
The Office of Labor Statistics (BLS) uses several surveys to estimate employment levels in the US and the reviews are common. Each monthly job report has a propaganda at the end that updates the figures of the previous two months depending on the new data.
President Donald Trump walks to Board Marine One to leave for New Jersey, at the White House in Washington, on August 1, 2025.
Jonathan Ernst/Reuters
The review to which Trump was referring was public on August 21 and was updated with the final figures in February 2025, according to the BLS website.
The same downward revisions also took place during Trump’s first mandate, under the then Bls William W. Beach commissioner. The agency determined that 518,000 less jobs were created in March 2019 of what it had initially informed.
Alternatively, Trump had no complaints about the job report produced under Mcentofer, a designated Biden, just before the 2024 elections, which showed that the United States won 12,000 jobs in October.
The then candidate referred to the low numbers while criticizing the Biden-Harris administration in a demonstration in Milwaukee.
“They did 12,000 jobs,” Trump told the boos in the demonstration on November 1. “There are hundreds of thousands of jobs less than it should be,” he added.
Trump also hurried to adopt job reports as president, when they were favorable.
In March 2017, when the Office of Labor Statistics announced that the economy added 235,000 jobs the previous month, the then Secretary of Press Sean Spicer said Trump had full faith in the positive report, despite calling him “false” in the past.
“I talked to the president before this and he said he would quote him very clearly:” They may have been false in the past, but now it is very real, “Spicer told journalists at that time.
Trump’s decision to fire Mcentofer on Friday took place on Friday after the report found that the United States had added 73,000 jobs in July, according to BLS data. The figure marked a deceleration of 147,000 jobs added in the previous month.
President Donald Trump talks to the media when he leaves the White House, on August 1, 2025 in Washington.
Win McNamee/Getty Images
The unemployment rate increased up to 4.2%, keeping it in almost historical minimums, according to the report.
The report provided new estimates for two previous months, significantly eliminating the estimation of the government of the added jobs in May and June. The new data indicated a remarkable deceleration in hiring, since Trump’s tariffs seized the last months.
Trump criticized Mtientefer for the revisions, saying without evidence that the reviews suggested that employment statistics had been “manipulated.”
ABC News has communicated with Mtarfer for a comment.
The Trump administration described the downward reviews as an inopportune sign for the economy of the United States, but did not dispute the data. “Obviously, they are not what we want to see,” said Stephen Miran, president of the White House Economic Advisors Council, Friday morning.
The friends of the Office of Labor Statistics, an organization chaired by the previous commissioners of BLS, William Beach and Erica L. Groshen, issued a statement on Friday, saying that Trump’s decision to fire Mcentofer “increases the unprecedented attacks of the president against the independence and integrity of the federal statistical system.”
“The president seeks to blame someone for unwanted economic news. The commissioner does not determine what the numbers are but simply reports on what the data shows,” reads the statement.
Beach was appointed by Trump during his first administration and Groshen was appointed by former President Barack Obama.
The organization asked the Congress to “respond immediately, to investigate the factors that led to the elimination of the MCencearfer Commissioner, strongly urge the continuous service of the commissioner and make sure that the non -partisan integrity of the position is retained.”
Asked by journalists while leaving the White House on Friday about the reason for the dismissal of Mcentofer, Trump said he believes that the economy is fine and said that the last job numbers were “false.”
“I think the numbers were false as they were before the elections, and there were other times,” Trump said, pointing out a previous review in job numbers last year he said, without evidence, it was an attempt to benefit the Democrats who were going to the elections. He said this despite using numbers as a topic of conversation in his campaign.
“So you know what I did? I said goodbye. And do you know what? He did the right thing,” Trump said.
