President Donald Trump recently attempted to justify his firing of Erika McEntarfer — the Senate-confirmed commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) — by claiming that she was changing jobs numbers for political purposes.
During a press conference last Thursday alongside Heritage Foundation economist Stephen Moore (a co-author of the far-right Project 2025 policy playbook) and several charts, Trump argued Moore's charts proved that McEntarfer was publishing fraudulent jobs numbers. The press conference was in response to July's jobs report, which showed meager job growth of just 73,000 new jobs (well below expectations) along with a downward revision of May and June job growth by hundreds of thousands of jobs.
In a Monday interview with Fortune, William Beach — who Trump nominated to a four-year term atop BLS in 2017 — blasted both Trump and Moore for the press conference, and accused them of purposefully presenting misleading jobs numbers.
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"He should have known better than to do that," Beach said of Moore, who he described as a "good friend" of more than 30 years.
Beach went on to say that Moore's figures were "the strangest thing in the world," and explained that the way the charts were presented was done in a way that suggested both Trump and Moore fundamentally misunderstood what the numbers actually meant. He mainly questioned the math behind the charts, pointing out that Moore misconstrued monthly BLS revisions with benchmark revisions. He likened the error to "counting the same apple twice and pretending you had two."
The BLS frequently adjusts jobs numbers after new data becomes available, and did so during former President Joe Biden's administration. Thew New York Times observed last week that regular revisions are "an inevitable if sometimes frustrating part of trying to measure a $30 trillion economy."
Beach questioned the fundamental premise of Trump's argument that McEntarfer would cook jobs numbers, and pointed out that the decentralized nature of BLS means that it would be effectively impossible for the chief statistician to concoct fake data. Trump has yet to name a new BLS chief, but said McEntarfer's replacement would have "credibility" and "experience."
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Click here to read Fortune's report in full.