Trump fires labor stats head after shaky jobs report.

I’m Isaac Saul, and this is Tangle: an independent, nonpartisan, subscriber-supported politics newsletter that summarizes the best arguments from across the political spectrum on the news of the day — then “my take.”

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Today’s read: 14 minutes.

Scientific misfire or ongoing crisis?

On Friday, we published Senior Editor Will Kaback’s piece on Utah’s Great Salt Lake, which featured interviews with scientists and policymakers on the controversy over the lake’s health. Will explored whether the scientific community overstated its findings when it projected the lake faced ecological collapse, if the state is doing enough to respond to the lake’s decline, and what this story reveals about the challenges of scientific communication in a post-Covid age. You can read the piece here. 

Correction.

In Thursday’s edition on Emil Bove’s federal judgeship confirmation, we referred to U.S. Deputy Attorney General and Donald Trump’s former personal attorney Todd Blanche as a “lifelong Republican” in the “My take” section of the newsletter. In fact, Blanche was a registered Democrat as recently as 2022, and only switched his registration to Republican in January 2024. Isaac was emphasizing Blanche’s relationship with Trump and crossed his wires with Blanche’s politics; the rest of our editing team missed the detail in fact-checking.

This is our 142nd correction in Tangle's 313-week history and our first correction since July 21st. We track corrections and place them at the top of the newsletter in an effort to maximize transparency with readers.

Quick hits.

1. A group of Democrats in Texas’s state House left the state in an attempt to block a vote on a new congressional map expected to give Republicans five additional seats in the U.S. House in the 2026 midterm elections. The departures deprive the chamber of a quorum, which is necessary to conduct legislative business. (The absences)
2. Hamas said it would not agree to disarm as part of a ceasefire deal to end the war in Gaza unless the agreement guarantees the creation of an independent, fully sovereign Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital. (The demand) Separately, Hamas released footage that shows Israeli hostage Evyatar David emaciated and digging what he said could be his own grave. David’s family approved the public release of the video and called for renewed efforts to save the hostages. (The video)
3. The search for a man suspected of shooting and killing four people at a bar in Anaconda, Montana, continued into a fourth day; authorities say the suspect is believed to still be armed and dangerous. (The manhunt)
4. The Federal Reserve announced Governor Adriana Kugler will retire on August 8, creating a vacancy on the board of governors. (The retirement)
5. Roughly 3,200 Boeing machinists in the St. Louis area went on strike after rejecting the company’s latest contract offer. (The strike)

Today’s topic.

The BLS commissioner’s firing. On Friday, President Donald Trump fired the commissioner of labor statistics for the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), Erika McEntarfer, after the agency released a lower-than-expected July jobs report and revised May's and June's numbers downwards. The BLS reported that nonfarm payrolls increased by 73,000 in July, below Dow Jones’s estimated gain of 100,000 jobs. Furthermore, the BLS revised the initial nonfarm payroll employment for May down by 125,000, from +144,000 to +19,000, and also revised June’s total downward by 133,000, from +147,000 to +14,000. The unemployment rate rose slightly to 4.2% from 4.1% in June.

Back up: The BLS is the agency within the Labor Department responsible for measuring market activity, working conditions, price changes, and productivity in the U.S. economy. Every month, the bureau compiles an employment report from a monthly survey of about 631,000 worksites selected to represent all U.S. employers. President Joe Biden nominated former Commissioner McEntarfer to lead the BLS as commissioner of labor statistics in July 2023, and the Senate voted 86–8 to confirm her in January 2024. A BLS spokesperson said that Deputy Commissioner William Wiatrowski will serve as acting commissioner until a new commissioner is confirmed. 

Jobs reports are routinely revised from month to month as the BLS receives additional information from businesses and government agencies, but May’s and June’s revisions were larger than normal. The lower-than-expected jobs totals for July, combined with the significant downward revisions from previous months’ reports, prompted concern among economists that the U.S. job market is weaker than previously thought.

In a post on Truth Social, President Trump claimed that McEntarfer had “faked the Jobs Numbers before the Election to try and boost Kamala’s chances of Victory,” adding, “Important numbers like this must be fair and accurate, they can’t be manipulated for political purposes.” Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer voiced support for McEntarfer’s removal.

In a post on Bluesky, McEntarfer called serving as BLS commissioner “the honor of my life” but did not comment directly on her firing. However, former BLS Commissioner William Beach, who was nominated for the role by President Trump in 2017, criticized the decision, saying that McEntarfer’s firing “undermines credibility” in the statistical reporting system.

Today, we’ll explore reactions from the left and right to the latest job numbers and McEntarfer’s firing. Then, Managing Editor Ari Weitzman and Senior Editor Will Kaback give their take. 

What the left is saying.

• The left strongly criticizes McEntarfer’s firing, suggesting it shows Trump’s authoritarian instincts. 
• Some say the jobs report revisions show the economy is in a precarious position.
• Others say future jobs reports can no longer be trusted under a Trump-appointed commissioner.

In The Atlantic, Jonathan Chait said “Trump shoots the messenger.”

“McEntarfer’s unpardonable sin was to oversee the routine release of BLS jobs data. This morning’s report showed that job growth last month fell somewhat short of expectations. The more interesting — and, to Trump, unwelcome — information came in its revisions, which found that previous months had much lower job growth than previous estimates,” Chait wrote. “Economists had been puzzling over the economy’s resilience despite Trump’s imposition of staggering tariffs. Now that we have the revised data, that resilience appears to have largely been a mirage.”

“Trump’s deeper confusion is his apparent belief that reported job numbers are what matter to him politically. He is obsessed with propaganda and has had phenomenal success manipulating the media and bullying his party into repeating even his most fantastical lies,” Chait said. “But, as Biden and Kamala Harris learned the hard way, voters don’t judge the economy on the basis of jobs reports. They judge it on the basis of how they and their community are doing. You can’t fool the public with fake numbers into thinking the economy is better than it is. All fake numbers can do is make it harder for policy makers to steer the economy.”

In The Washington Post, Julien Berman wrote about “the bleak economic picture emerging from the jobs numbers.”

“Three-quarters of the added jobs were in just one sector: health care. Along with the lower numbers, this suggests that America is starting to see the effects of Trump’s tariffs ripple through the economy,” Berman said. “Sectors such as manufacturing rely on global supply chains to provide raw materials and parts — steel, aluminum, machinery and so on — that they turn into finished products. When tariffs raise the costs of these input materials, businesses have an incentive to scale back. Then investment declines — and hiring slows.”

“Add to this the growth estimates from the first half of the year, which show a slowdown in both overall consumption and investment, and a bleak picture comes into focus: The American economy is losing steam,” Berman wrote. “Whether a fall in rates would soften the blow is another question. Next month, the Labor Department will release its annual benchmark revision — a once-a-year adjustment that matches the monthly jobs survey data to more complete payroll records. If past trends hold, the jobs numbers could be revised downward even further — suggesting that the labor market has been weaker than realized for some time.”

In his Substack, Robert Reich called Trump’s firing of McEntarfer “irresponsible.”

“I spent much of the 1990s as secretary of labor. One unit of the Labor Department is the Bureau of Labor Statistics. I was instructed by my predecessors as well as by the White House, and by every labor economist and statistician I came in contact with, that one of my cardinal responsibilities was to guard the independence of the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Otherwise, this crown jewel of knowledge about jobs and the economy would be compromised. If politicized, it would no longer be trusted as a source of information,” Reich said. “So what does Trump do? In one fell swoop on Friday he essentially destroyed the credibility of the BLS.”

“How can anyone in the future trust the information that emerges from the Bureau of Labor Statistics when the person in charge of the agency has to come up with data to Trump’s liking in order to stay in the job? Answer: They cannot,” Reich wrote. “Trump is in the process of trying to do the same with the Federal Reserve — demanding that Jerome Powell, the Fed’s chair, cut interest rates. Trump is even threatening Powell with a Trumped-up expose of Powell’s supposed extravagance in refurbishing the Fed as a means of forcing Powell to do his bidding or resign. What happens to the Fed’s credibility if Powell gives in to Trump? It evaporates.”

What the right is saying.

• Many on the right see the jobs numbers as a minor deviation from an overall robust economic picture. 
• Some suggest the economy is flashing warning signs and say firing McEntarfer won’t help. 
• Others argue the jobs report shows Trump is succeeding in revitalizing the native U.S. workforce. 

The Washington Examiner editorial board wrote “the Trump economy is delivering for American workers.”

“Employers may have added just 73,000 jobs in the month of July, according to the latest Labor Department jobs report published Friday. But that same survey found that the number of native-born workers with jobs rose by 383,000, bringing the total number of native-born jobs gained to over 2 million since President Donald Trump took office. All this while real wages and household income are rising too,” the board said. “Many economists predicted that Trump’s tariffs would cause inflation and even a recession. Those predictions have been proven wrong. Inflation is falling under Trump while the economy is growing, albeit at a measured pace.”

“Consumer sentiment is up, housing starts and permits are rising, even while sales of existing homes fall thanks to high interest rates, while both personal income and personal savings rates are rising,” the board wrote. “The top-line numbers may not be obviously impressive. A mere 73,000 jobs gained in July and the unemployment rate ticking up to 4.2% don’t sound like a booming economy. But those numbers don’t capture the underlying churn taking place. Instead of an economy dependent on a mass influx of illegal immigrant labor, Trump is building an economy where native-born workers get the jobs they deserve at wages that can support a family.”

The Wall Street Journal editorial board said “the Trump economy stumbles.”

“President Trump has now imposed his new tariff regime on the world, and the triumphalism is palpable in MAGA land. But maybe hold the euphoria, as this week’s reports on jobs and the economy suggest the new golden age may take a while to appear,” the board wrote. “The details in the report provide little solace. The jobless rate ticked up only to 4.25% from 4.1%, but that was in part because the labor force continued to shrink. The labor participation rate fell again to 62.2% and is now down half a percentage point in a year.”

“Mr. Trump seems to understand that the jobs report signals trouble because on Friday he ordered the firing of the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics. He claims the numbers are being politically manipulated, but he offered no proof. BLS has its problems, but the timing suggests he’s shooting the messenger. There are bound to be monthly revisions when tariff and deportation policies are so volatile.”

In American Greatness, Roger Kimball questioned “the left’s premature celebration over jobs data.”

“Notwithstanding the tocsins of anti-Trump fury, the report wasn’t really that bad. The left seized on it as one shred of possibly lukewarm economic news in the midst of an ocean of upbeat news — the deals with countries across the globe, the taming of inflation, unemployment hovering just above 4%, and the billions of dollars already realized through Trump’s tariffs: it presents a very robust picture overall,” Kimball wrote. “Senator John Kennedy got it right when he noted that ‘This jobs report isn’t perfect, but I wouldn’t trade America’s economy today for that of any other country, thanks to President Trump.’”

“It is important to place [this report] in the context of the large shift in the U.S. economy that Trump is endeavoring to bring about. The tariffs, the ‘America First’ rhetoric and policies, and the twin initiatives to seal the border and deport the people who are here illegally: all this is part of an effort to reorient the U.S. economy away from the sugar high of globalist debt and spending, and back to the ethic of ‘Made in America,’” Kimball said. “The policies designed to encourage the return of manufacturing to the U.S. will help whittle at the gargantuan federal debt (now approaching $37 trillion) and also put upward pressure on the wages of U.S. workers.”

My take.

Reminder: “My take” is a section where we give ourselves space to share a own personal opinion from our staff. If you have feedback, criticism or compliments, don't unsubscribe. Write in by replying to this email, or leave a comment.

• Even given the challenges with initial estimates, the BLS has been unable to get them right lately.
• The numbers aren’t political, though — they reflect a struggling labor market amid a relatively stable economy.
• I don’t buy Trump’s claims of politicization, and I don’t see how this firing helps.

President Trump is understandably frustrated by July’s jobs report, but Will and I both found his decision to fire the commissioner of labor statistics to be an impulsive and counterproductive move. The headline could write itself, but The Atlantic supplied it today: “Trump shoots the messenger.”

I had a knee-jerk negative reaction after I read Trump’s post on Truth Social, and as I dug into this story, the first things I learned confirmed my priors. First, Trump said he would replace McEntarfer with someone “more competent and qualified,” but if either of those qualities were truly in question then they would have come up before the Senate confirmed her 86–8. She hasn’t somehow become unqualified since then, and Trump hasn’t convinced me that McEntarfer suddenly became incompetent after assuming the role. 

Second, Trump railed against the BLS for releasing optimistic job numbers under the Biden–Harris administration that would later be revised down as proof of bias in favor of the former president. Secretary of State Rubio (who voted to confirm McEntarfer) said the same thing in August of last year (when the initial numbers were revised down by 81,000). Similar downward revisions can’t logically be both proof of bias in favor of the former president and bias against the current president. And if BLS were cooking the numbers, why release friendly preliminary reports at all? Furthermore, the final jobs report before the 2024 election showed very moderate job gains (+12,000) and revised the job totals from September and August down a combined 112,000. If the BLS was in the bag for the Democrats, how would releasing that report on the eve of the election help them? The logic doesn’t make sense.

I simply don’t buy the argument coming from this administration that the jobs numbers are being faked. The evidence presented in support of the argument is not proof of a political hit job, but of the BLS following normal procedure to update its numbers and improve the accuracy of its projections over time. However, it’s still possible that broader data could justify McEntarfer’s dismissal, even if Trump’s stated reasoning is unconvincing.

Below is a chart posted on X that shows the relative difference between BLS’s initial survey of total U.S. jobs gains or losses and its final revised total, for every month of 2025 so far. The data is all corroborated by the BLS’s own reports, and it shows an obvious trend:

Just to state the obvious: Since the start of Trump’s term, the numbers are only being revised in one direction, and with one exception the initial estimates have been getting progressively worse.

Now, I’m going to share a portion of a chart compiled by a Reddit user (from publicly available data from the St. Louis Federal Reserve) of the difference in every revision since 2008. What stands out to you?

To me, two things stand out when I look at this chart. First is how evident the 2008 Great Recession, the pandemic drop, and the post-pandemic recovery are in the data. And, given what we know about how this data is collected, that actually makes sense; BLS surveys about 631,000 worksites for their employment data as of the 12th of the month, then revises the monthly numbers as more data comes out. The corrections to the jobs reports in 2008 were likely caused by numbers that continued to decrease throughout consecutive months, while reports late in 2021 showed an economy actively adding jobs as it rebounded from the pandemic. In short: A growing job market has positive revisions, a shrinking job market has negative revisions.

The second thing that stands out to me is that getting these numbers right the first time is pretty hard. Aside from a period of relatively small revisions at the end of Obama’s term and the beginning of Trump’s, since 2008, the BLS has routinely revised its monthly jobs estimates by tens of thousands. 

And the job seems to only be getting harder. National Review’s Dominic Pino wrote a thorough breakdown of the complex work that goes into producing these reports, noting how variables like seasonal employment patterns, self-employment, and new and shuttered businesses make creating an accurate snapshot of the economy on the first try very difficult. Furthermore, the response rate to BLS surveys has dipped since the pandemic. Ironically, Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick fired the team of people who help us know how many people are getting fired, making it even more difficult to get accurate initial estimates. 

To put it bluntly: We’re getting a picture of a struggling job market from a bureau that itself is struggling. Thanks to July’s report, we know the job market is on uncertain footing and that the only two sectors that showed healthy job gains were healthcare and social assistance, two sectors reliant on government spending. Conversely, employment in industries that Trump is trying to boost with tariffs have hit a wall: Since May, manufacturing, wholesale trade, and retail trade — three sectors most sensitive to tariff policies — have lost jobs. Meanwhile, both the rates of nonfarm hiring and workers quitting their jobs are steadily decreasing, showing a labor market that’s getting tighter and tighter. 

Apart from the labor market, however, the economic picture is actually quite rosy — gross domestic product increased 3% in Q2, consumer spending continues to tick up, unemployment remains low and stable, and inflation is continuing to moderate. A few disappointing jobs reports don’t make for a five-alarm fire, but they are still concerning — and dismissing the person who oversaw them does nothing to change the underlying economic reality. 

This doesn’t totally exonerate McEntarfer; while moderate revisions are normal, revisions in the hundreds of thousands are more unusual, and it’s fair to question whether the BLS is doing enough to address the source of these misses. Even if the explanation for the inaccuracies is likely apolitical, the BLS couldn’t have missed the mark for several months on end at a worse time politically, as more accurate numbers could have changed the Fed’s decision not to cut rates at its last meeting or eased Trump’s aggressiveness in setting new tariff rates. For Trump and the Fed, it’s a bit like skipping a stop at a gas station because your fuel gauge says you’ve still got half a tank, only to realize the gauge was broken and you’re a ways off from the nearest station. Of course, fixing the problem requires addressing the malfunction in the system — it can’t be done by putting a smiley-face sticker over the gauge.

Instead, this firing looks like a case of Trump injecting us-versus-them politics into another arena that could really benefit from reasonable discussion. Whoever takes the role next will still be attempting a difficult task with dwindling resources, but with the addition of a white-hot spotlight of the political culture war beating down on them.

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Your questions, answered.

Q: I really appreciate the content that Tangle provides and find it very useful to understand the political issues from both perspectives. I would love to hear more about Trump’s tariff war with Brazil and his attempt to interfere with their legal investigation of former President Bolsonaro. How much power does Trump really have on this matter? Can he really deny visas to all of the Supreme Court justices who are involved in Bolsonaro’s trial? What do we know about Bolsonaro’s trial?

— Camila from Brazil

Tangle: Great question — as a quick catch-up, President Trump ordered tariffs from 10–41% to be imposed on 69 countries beginning on August 7, including a 10% levy on Brazil. However, separate from that executive order, Trump also ordered an additional 40% tariff on the South American country, for a net 50% import duty. The order also revoked the visas of Brazilian Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes, “his allies on the Court, and their immediate family members” for purportedly enabling “human rights violations against Brazilians and free speech violations against Americans.”

Unlike the other countries under his “reciprocal tariffs” order, Trump is not tariffing Brazilian imports to address a trade deficit — the United States actually has a trade surplus with Brazil. Instead, Trump has issued the tariffs in response to the country’s prosecution of former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, and alleged silencing of his supporters, which Trump has likened to human rights abuses and claimed is a national security threat to the United States. Bolsonaro is a strong Trump ally, and Trump has maintained that the prosecution is a “witch hunt.” 

How much power does Trump have on this matter? Setting foreign policy is within the purview of the president, but courts are still determining if he can claim the power to unilaterally tariff countries by declaring an emergency. The president may not have that legal authority, and in a few months (or weeks!) Trump may not be able to wield tariffs as a foreign-policy tool at all. 

Can he deny visas to these judges? Maybe. The president can suspend entry to any aliens he deems detrimental to the interests of the United States — which matches the language Trump used in his executive order. That authority has limits; for instance, it can’t be issued under an “arbitrary or capricious standard.” The Supreme Court clarified one of these limits in Kleindienst v. Mandel (1972), in which the court ruled that the government could deny entry to avowed communists, as long as the state could reasonably claim a “facially legitimate and bona fide reason” in the national interest for their denial. If the administration can pass that legal test, then they could deny these visas.

What do we know about the Bolsonaro trial? The ex-president of Brazil faces 40 years in prison for allegedly organizing an attempted coup and plotting to murder the current president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, and a supreme court justice. Our friends at Global Post have more.

Want to have a question answered in the newsletter? You can reply to this email (it goes straight to our inbox) or fill out this form.

Under the radar.

The Trump administration is reportedly planning a five-year “experiment” to cover GLP-1 weight loss drugs under Medicare and Medicaid. GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic, Wegovy and others have surged in popularity in recent years as a treatment for obesity, but Medicare and Medicaid typically only cover them for patients with Type 2 diabetes. Now, the administration’s proposed plan would give state Medicaid programs and Medicare Part D insurance plans the ability to choose whether to expand coverage for the drugs to “weight management” purposes. The program is tentatively expected to start in April 2026 for Medicaid and January 2027 for Medicare plans. The Washington Post has the story.

Numbers.

• 163.1 million. The approximate total number of nonfarm jobs in the U.S. economy as of July.
• 161.2 million. The approximate total number of nonfarm jobs in the U.S. economy in July 2024.
• 37.7%. The odds that the Federal Reserve will cut interest rates at its September meeting as of Wednesday — before the July jobs report was released — according to the CME FedWatch Tool.
• 69.2%. The odds on Friday — after the jobs report was released — that the Federal Reserve will cut interest rates at its September meeting. 
• 63.0%. The response rate to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’s Current Employment Statistics (CES) survey in March 2017. 
• 42.6%. The response rate to the CES survey in March 2025 (the most recent month for which data is available). 
• –26. Gallup’s Economic Index Score, which measures Americans’ assessment of the economy from –100 to 100, in October 2024. 
• –14. Gallup’s Economic Index Score in June 2025. 

The extras.

• One year ago today we had just published our annual State of Tangle edition.
• The most clicked link in Thursday’s newsletter was the man who coded PNG data into a bird’s song.
• Nothing to do with politics: A California man was arrested for allegedly scamming dating-app matches out of $2 million.
• Thursday’s survey: 2,853 readers responded to our survey on the allegations against Emil Bove with 94% finding the claims credible. “Emil Bove should NOT be a judge,” one respondent said.

Have a nice day.

After surviving a combat injury in Vietnam and struggling with PTSD, retired Marine Cpl. Scott Harrison kept envisioning a carousel in a mountain meadow — “an image totally opposite of where people are trying to kill each other.” In 1986, he bought a broken-down carousel and spent 26 years carving new animals by hand. Today, his creation, the Carousel of Happiness in Nederland, Colorado, has brought joy to over a million visitors. “I started out trying to treat myself, and then it just changed into something that I could do for others,” Harrison said. CBS News has the story.

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