A former head of a government agency who was ousted by Donald Trump has warned that he made a ‘dangerous’ misstep in firing her.

Erika McEntarfer was dismissed from her role as head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics last month after the president accused her of manipulating jobs numbers to damage his political standing.

He referenced McEntarfer’s amendments to the May and June employment reports, which together indicated a loss of 258,000 jobs in the US. Following these adjustments, June’s figure was revised to just 14,000 and May’s to 19,000, essentially making the numbers flat.

Speaking for the first time since her public ousting on Tuesday, McEntarfer hit out at the president.

‘Dismissing your chief statistician is a risky move,’ she said to students at Bard College, her alma mater, according to CNN. ‘This is an assault on the independence of an institution arguably as vital as the Federal Reserve for maintaining economic stability.’

‘It has serious economic consequences, but that they would do this with no warning — it made no sense,’ she said of her sudden termination.

‘Messing with economic data is like messing with the traffic lights and turning the sensors off: Cars don’t know where to go, traffic backs up at intersections.’ 

She then pointed to what she called ‘not a good list’ of other countries where statisticians have been fired over disappointing data, including Argentina, Greece and Turkey, the Wall Street Journal reports. 

Erika McEntarfer has spoken out for the first time since she was fired from her position as the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics

Donald Trump accused her of ‘faking’ jobs numbers to make him look bad politically

‘The rising loss of trust in economic statistics led these countries to worsening economic crises, higher inflation and higher borrowing costs,’ she said.

McEntarfer also spoke about her short term at the Bureau of Labor Statistics, after spending much of her career working to improve statistics quality at the Census Bureau.

She was tapped to lead the Bureau of Labor Statistics by former President Joe Biden in 2023, when she was a staffer on Biden’s Council of Economic Advisers.

As she took the helm at the bureau, McEntarfer said she had hopes to improve the statistics on employment and inflation and wanted to ‘help BLS modernize data collection,’ as the agency relies on phone calls to ask people about their job status and sends employees to check prices on the store shelves themselves.

But soon, McEntarfer found herself guarding the department against interference from the Department of Government Efficiency.

‘I went from big-picture reformer to being on the defensive pretty quickly,’ she recounted, saying she had to navigate ‘more crises in a week than you see in a year in normal times’ and keeping the agency operational became a ‘constant high-wire act.’

The bureau had already been strained by tight budgets, staffing shortages and fewer responses to its massive economic surveys it uses to collect its data.

Still, McEntarfer said she worked to produce accurate data.

Trump claimed, without evidence, that the bureau had previously doctored jobs data

‘I can vouch for the accuracy and independence of the work at the agency up until the moment I was fired,’ she told the students on Tuesday. 

Even on the day she was fired, which she said was a normal Friday, McEntarfer stood by her data.

She told how she met Trump administration officials that day, and sought to explain to them that the downward revisions were necessary for the May and June jobs data because companies that responded late to the agency’s payroll survey reported unexpectedly poor hiring.

That happens ‘when the economy slows,’ she said, noting that the businesses were likely responding late to the survey because ‘they’re just too busy trying to stay alive.’

The White House officials appeared glum as she spoke, but McEntarfer said they did not ask any questions.

She only found out later that day that she was being fired when a reporter reached out to her for comment on President Trump’s Truth Social post.

In it, the president accused McEntarfer of ‘faking’ jobs numbers before the 2024 election to ‘try and boost Kamala’s chances of victory,’ in a blistering post to Truth Social that did not provide evidence of the stunning accusation.

‘We need accurate jobs numbers. I have directed my team to fire this Biden political appointee, IMMEDIATELY. She will be replaced with someone much more competent and qualified,’ he stated.

McEntarfer insisted all of the data up until her termination was accurate

‘I believe the numbers were phony – just like they were before the election,’ Trump said, without providing evidence for the claim.  ‘You know what I did? I fired her,’ he said.

‘I said, “Who is the person that does these numbers … She gave out numbers that were so good for the Democrats. It was like unbelievable. And then right after the election, she corrected those numbers,’ Trump said, referencing the revised figures.

At first, McEntarfer said she found her termination hard to believe because even though the president had publicly toyed for months with firing Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell, McEntarfer did not think she would be a target of Trump’s ire.

‘I had always been careful not to bore family and friends by talking too much about my wonky job,’ she recounted on Tuesday. ‘Now all of a sudden, the whole world was talking about it. 

‘By the end of the day, I had been very publicly fired by the president of the United States and was on my way to becoming a household name.’

Trump has picked EJ Antoni, a chief economist at the conservative Heritage Foundation, to succeed McEntarfer

Since McEntarfer’s ouster, the Bureau of Labor Statistics has been led by Acting Commissioner William Wiatrowski, whom McEntarfer praised on Tuesday as ‘one of the finest public servants I have ever worked with.’

‘But in terms of the future, it is an uncertain moment.’

Trump’s pick to succeed McEntarfer, E.J. Antoni, a chief economist at the conservative Heritage Foundation, has no prior government experience and has been accused of spreading inaccuracies in his work.

Economist Stan Veuger, a senior fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, for example, told Axios that Antoni’s ‘work at Heritage has frequently included elementary errors or nonsensical choices that all bias his findings in the same partisan direction.’ 

‘The articles and tweets I’ve seen him publish are probably the most error-filled of any think tank economist right now. I hope we see better at BLS,’ another economist, Jessica Riedl of the Manhattan Institute, agreed.

If Antoni is now successful in becoming the new head of the bureau, he would like to ‘suspend issuing the monthly job reports’ entirely, he said in an interview with Fox Business.

He said the bureau should instead ‘keep publishing the more accurate, though less timely, quarterly data.’