The recent firing of the commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) has one analyst worried that President Donald Trump may end up sabotaging the U.S. economy — and the United States itself — over perceived slights to his ego.
In a Monday op-ed for the New York Times, columnist Thomas Friedman warned of the precedent set by Trump firing Erika McEntarfer — the person in charge of gathering data that scores of investors, companies and economists all depend on to gauge the health of the economy. Friedman lamented at the meek response to McEntarfer’s firing by those very same experts who count on the government to provide reliable data.
The Times columnist compared the firing of the BLS commissioner to Trump’s 2021 call to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensberger (R), in which the lame-duck president ordered Georgia’s top elections official to “find” 11,780 votes in order to flip the state’s electoral votes from then-President-elect Joe Biden back to the Republican column. He further opined that in 2025, one would be hard-pressed to find a Republican willing to resist Trump’s authoritarian impulses.
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“[B]ack then there was something called a Republican official with integrity. And so Georgia’s secretary of state did not agree to fabricate votes that did not exist,” he wrote.” But that species of Republican official seems to have gone completely extinct in Trump’s second term. So Trump’s rotten character is now a problem for our whole economy.”
Friedman also pointed out that even as Labor Secretary Lori Chavez DeRemer went on Bloomberg TV after the July jobs report was released — which showed anemic job growth of just 73,000 new non-farm payroll jobs (below expectations of 110,000) — the labor market under the second Trump administration was still robust. But after the BLS adjusted job growth down by 375,000 jobs over the past several months (BLS adjustments are commonplace) and Trump fired McEntarfer, DeRemer demurred and backed Trump’s decision to fire the top economic statistician. According to Friedman, this will have a chilling effect for any government official reporting numbers that aren’t flattering to the administration.
“Going forward, how many government bureaucrats are going to dare to pass along bad news when they know that their bosses — people like Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, the director of the National Economic Council, Kevin Hassett, the Labor Secretary Chavez-DeRemer and the U.S. trade representative Jamieson Greer — will not only fail to defend them but will actually offer them up as a sacrifice to Trump to keep their jobs?” He wrote.
“[T]hough I am a congenital optimist, for the first time I believe that if the behavior that this administration has exhibited in just its first six months continues and is amplified for its full four years, the America you know will be gone,” he added. “And I don’t know how we will get it back.”
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Click here to read Friedman’s full column in the New York Times (subscription required).