Following major shakeups at the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), September’s labor market data has many on their toes.
President Donald Trump fired BLS commissioner Erika McEnterfar on Aug. 1, following a disappointing jobs report that estimated employers added only 73,000 jobs in July and revised job growth down by 258,000 in May and June.
“She will be replaced with someone much more competent and qualified. Important numbers like this must be fair and accurate, they can’t be manipulated for political purposes,” Trump wrote on his social media platform. There has been zero evidence of “rigged” data on her part.
McEnterfar’s removal raised concerns among experts including former BLS commissioners (appointed by both Democratic and Republic presidents), who warned it could undermine trust in the agency. Then, on Aug. 11, Trump nominated a replacement: E.J. Antoni, chief economist of the Heritage Foundation, the conservative think tank that published Project 2025.
Antoni’s nomination, which is expected to go in front of the Senate HELP Committee this month, has been met with outcry from many economists, who’ve said he is “completely unqualified” to lead the BLS and fear he would use the agency and its data to further the Trump administration’s political agenda, rather than report objective statistics.
Broken trust. The outcry sends a worrying signal to HR and talent acquisition (TA) leaders, who use BLS data for everything from forecasting changes in labor supply and demand by location to tracking wage growth by industry.
“Bipartisan groups, including former BLS officials and commissioners, economists, watchdog orgs, condemned that firing as a literal threat to statistical independence… [that] is something that will make every chief people officer, every economist, every talent acquisition leader, raise their eyebrows quite a bit,” Matt Staney, VP of community at HIGHER Community, a professional group that counts more than 12,000 senior TA leaders among its members, told HR Brew.
At the time of McEnterfar’s firing, Lauren Winans, CEO and principal HR consultant at Next Level Benefits, assumed that the BLS commissioner must have done something “really egregious” to warrant her dismissal, until she looked at the revisions.
“But then when you dig into it, the updates and the revisions that were made to the data are pretty standard, because it’s statistical data, and because things are collected in somewhat of an antiquated way, and there are delays,” she said, adding later, “I thought the rush to judgment to immediately go after the commissioner was a little shortsighted, because then it creates this crack in the stability and the credibility of the agency itself.”
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Near-sighted. The BLS has faced criticism over its revisions and data collection methodology. But proposals from the Trump administration and Antoni to “improve the data”—by exchanging the monthly jobs report for a quarterly, for example—could impact how HR leaders craft their hiring strategies, Winans said. Additionally, after significant methodological changes, it could take months before the data is trustworthy again.
“Certainly if they make a shift in methodology, I probably would give it at least a couple of cycles before I maybe trust the data, because when you switch that methodology, that does kind of create some significant change in the way the numbers look and how long it takes to kind of catch up with itself,” Winans said, noting she would continue to use the data as one of several indicators of economic health.
However, McEnterfar’s baseless firing over an upsetting jobs report has already sowed mistrust in future data among HR and TA leaders, said Staney. Employers were planning their hiring strategies on a quarterly basis, as crises from policies like tariffs worsened economic uncertainty. As the integrity of the jobs data creates more uncertainty, TA leaders’ planning will only become more short term.
“When TA leaders pitch workforce strategy to execs, they need to be able to point to independent and trusted sources, and we’re running out of those now, if these sources become political tools,” said Staney. “If he just implants a loyalist into the BLS to just paint whatever picture he wants, we’re going to be flying completely blind, and nobody’s going to trust anything, and companies are not going to hire in a healthy way, and our unemployment situation will worsen.”