The former Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) commissioner, Erika McEntarfer, on Tuesday made her first public remarks since she was fired by President Trump last month following a poor jobs report and substantial revisions to earlier data.
Speaking at the Levy Economics Institute at Bard College, her alma mater, McEntarfer recounted her experience learning she had been fired and warned of the potential economic consequences of her firing, according to multiple news reports.
“August 1 was like any other first Friday of the month when the job numbers come out, and my quiet and usually obscure little corner [of] the government goes about its business of telling political leaders what these data tell us about the state of the economy,” she said during her lecture, according to the reports.
“Except, by the end of that day, I had been very publicly fired by the president of the United States and was on my way to becoming a household name. It was quite a day, to say the least,” she continued.
McEntarfer said she first learned she had been fired when she was contacted by a reporter asking for comment on Trump’s social media post calling for her firing.
“To be honest, I didn’t actually believe I had been fired,” McEntarfer said. She then checked her inbox and saw a message 20 minutes earlier from the White House informing her that she was “terminated effective immediately.”
When Trump fired McEntarfer, he accused her of falsifying jobs numbers to disadvantage him politically. Economists across the political spectrum have said that sort of falsification would be impossible, noting revisions to job numbers are routine and reflect delayed reporting from employers.
“I can vouch for the accuracy and independence of the work of the agency up until the moment I was fired,” McEntarfer, a Biden appointee, said on Tuesday.
McEntarfer also warned of the danger of interfering with the independence of BLS.
“Firing your chief statistician is a dangerous step,” she said at the lecture. “That’s an attack on the independence of an institution arguably as important as the Federal Reserve for economic stability. It has serious economic consequences, but that they would do this with no warning — it made no sense.”
“Messing with economic data is like messing with the traffic lights and turning the sensors off,” she added. “Cars don’t know where to go, traffic backs up at intersections.”
She also noted that other countries have pushed out statisticians because of disappointing data and have suffered the consequences, pointing to Argentina, Greece and Turkey.
“The resulting loss of trust in economic statistics led these countries to worsening economic crises, higher inflation and higher borrowing costs,” she said.
