It’s pretty clear that the only numbers this administration are interested in are ones that support the narrative that the great leader is infallible.
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If it were me I'd be sacking people until they started getting a mean adjustment somewhere around 0. I doubt that is what Trump is doing, but the managers left themselves vulnerable to technical criticism.
[0] https://mishtalk.com/economics/in-honor-of-labor-day-lets-re...
Why sack them? It's not like they refused to mean adjust or failed to do so. The numbers came out, and before anybody has even had a chance to question them. Before any coherent criticism as had time to root, the person responsible is fired.
Firing people is not how you get more accurate numbers. It's how you get yes-men.
Moreover, do note that all published numbers come with standard errors [2] and 90% confidence intervals, which did include the corrections of -133k and -120k that were made for May and June. The current interval for July is -63k to +209k [3]. Anybody who understood high school stats knows the meaning and implications of this.
[1] https://www.bls.gov/web/empsit/cesnaicsrev.htm#Summary
It is like they failed to do so - there is a timeseries of consistently negative adjustments. The BLS revising numbers down isn't an unexpected event, that is pretty standard for their jobs reports.
It is better to resolve things with a conversation rather than formal action. But if a conversation doesn't get immediate results it is fastest just to move people on at that level of seniority. The competition is fierce and it is more about finding the right person for the job than trying to micromanage performance.
And I'm not going to bother digging through the manuals to figure out how the BLS is calculating their standard errors, but there is a pretty decent chance they've been calculated assuming that the error mean is 0 when in fact it appears to be biased.
And the commissioner was just sacked and the reason given was because she was incompetent. Goes to show the risks of being in a high performing environment and not having a trivially demonstrable track record of high performance. If a dude with no particular track record can clearly articulate why the numbers are biased then your employment might fall into question.
When reality and truth do not matter, why would they want accurate numbers? They do not need the country to flourish, they just need their personal wealth to grow and the rest of the population to remain compliant. From that point of view, shooting the messenger before the message gets out of control makes perfect sense. It is working well enough for many autocratic regimes around the world.
When the jobs market is currently being impacted by a leader throwing around unprecedented tariffs, and upending decades of economic practice by throwing away national deals that he himself negotiated, you are not going to be able to accurately predict things - because they are unprecedented.
Which is certainly a political reason and easy to disagree with. But it is reasonable and factually defensible. Her Bureau has been publishing optimistic estimates.
[0] https://www.whitehouse.gov/articles/2025/08/bls-has-lengthy-...
More generally, this is incredibly dumb in many, many ways. Like, the BLS can't control survey response rates, and the fact that Covid has broken the seasonal models for basically every long-run time series is also outside their control.
One could argue that they should be using IRS tax data to figure this out, but that would be a massive change.
And finally, if the numbers looked good, there would have been no firing (regardless of the errors). It's gonna be an interesting Monday on Wall St.
In fairness though, Trump's decision is clearly political, these sort of technical factors aren't important enough to rate an official press release and there isn't a cut and dried case that there is anything wrong with the BLS's methods looking in from the sidelines. But for the last few years they have been too optimistic with their estimates and that does strengthen Trump's case.