Some Republican senators have expressed concern about President Donald Trump’s decision Friday to fire the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics hours after the release of the July jobs report.
Several Republicans told NBC News that they would take issue with the firing of Erika McEntarfer, the commissioner of the BLS, if it is the result of Trump disliking the jobs report numbers, which showed the U.S. job market in the past months has been considerably weaker than previously thought.
Trump defended his decision Friday, saying without evidence that the report’s numbers were “phony” and accused McEntarfer of releasing favorable jobs numbers before the election to give former Vice President Kamala Harris an edge.
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Sen. Cynthia Lummis, R-Wy., said if the data is untrustworthy, the public should find out, but firing the commissioner before knowing whether the numbers are inaccurate is “kind of impetuous.”
“If the president is firing the statistician because he doesn’t like the numbers but they are accurate, then that’s a problem,” Lummis said. “It’s not the statistician’s fault if the numbers are accurate and that they’re not what the president had hoped for.”
Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., blasted Trump’s decision to fire McEntarfer as well.
“If she was just fired because the president or whoever decided to fire the director just did it because they didn’t like the numbers, they ought to grow up,” Tillis said.
Tillis announced in June that he does not intend to run for re-election, a day after opposing Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill,” and subsequently drawing the president’s ire, including a threat to back a primary challenge against the senator.
Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., who found out about the commissioner’s firing from NBC News’ question to him about it, said he did not know much about the topic but proceeded to question whether the move would be effective in improving the numbers.
“We have to look somewhere for objective statistics. When the people providing the statistics are fired, it makes it much harder to make judgments that you know, the statistics won’t be politicized,” Paul said.
“I’m going to look into it, but first impression is that you can’t really make the numbers different or better by firing the people doing the counting,” he added.
Paul also opposed Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” in June. The senator said in June that due to his vocal opposition, he was uninvited from an annual White House picnic in the weeks leading up to the vote on the sweeping domestic policy package. However, Trump later said Paul and his family were invited.
Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, said she cannot trust the job numbers — and “that’s the problem.”
“And when you fire people, then it makes people trust them even less,” she said.
Democratic senators have spoken out against McEntarfer’s firing, too, with Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., accusing Trump of acting like “someone who imitates authoritarian leaders” during remarks on the Senate floor Friday.
Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., called the move “the sign of an authoritarian type” and added, “what that means is, I think the American people are going to find it hard to believe the information that comes out of the government, because Trump will always want it to be great news, and when that happens, it’s hard for us to deal with the problems, because we don’t know what is going on.”
Sen. Brian Schatz, D-Hawaii, went a step further, calling McEntarfer’s dismissal “the stuff of fascist dictatorships.”
Former BLS Commissioner William Beach, whom Trump appointed to the position and was confirmed by the Senate in 2019, made a post on X calling McEntarfer’s firing “totally groundless,” “a dangerous precedent,” and undermining “the statistical mission of the Bureau.”
A statement by “The Friends of the Bureau of Labor Statistics,” co-signed by Beach, affirmed the accuracy of the bureau’s work and of McEntarfer specifically.
“The process of obtaining the numbers is decentralized by design to avoid opportunities for interference. The BLS uses the same proven, transparent, reliable process to produce estimates every month. Every month, BLS revises the prior two months’ employment estimates to reflect slower-arriving, more-accurate information,” the statement read.
“BLS operates as a federal statistical agency and is afforded autonomy to ensure the data it releases are as accurate as possible,” it added.