the staff of the Ridgewood blog
Washington DC, the accuracy of the nation’s jobs reports is under fire after President Trump fired Erika McEntarfer, head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), on Friday afternoon. The decision followed a bombshell downward revision in the July jobs report—slashing earlier estimates for May and June by roughly 250,000 jobs.
Trump has been vocal about his frustration, arguing that the BLS’s initial numbers are becoming increasingly unreliable, impairing sound economic policy decisions. While critics often suspect political motives behind such data shifts, this situation may be a case of Hanlon’s Razor: “Never attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence.”
The issue stems from a growing gap between initial job estimates and later revisions—often downward—at unprecedented levels. A major factor? Employer survey response rates have plunged, reducing the reliability of early numbers.
Under the Biden administration, the BLS has already revised its original monthly job estimates down by a staggering 800,000 jobs. Sources inside the agency suggest further revisions could erase as many as 500,000 more “phantom jobs,” bringing the total to nearly 1.5 million jobs that never existed.
With McEntarfer out, the hope is that new leadership will overhaul the methodology to deliver more accurate, trustworthy job data in the future. For now, this shake-up underscores just how critical—and fragile—our labor market measurements have become.
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