Erika McEntarfer, the Bureau of Labor Statistics chief fired by President Donald Trump last month, spoke about her highly controversial separation from the agency for the first time Tuesday.
“Firing your chief statistician is a dangerous step,” she told an audience at Bard College, per CNN. “That’s an attack on the independence of an institution arguably as important as the Federal Reserve for economic stability. It has serious economic consequences. But that they would do this with no warning — it made no sense.”
Trump became enraged in August after the BLS released its usual jobs report on the first Friday of the month with revised data showing the economy has actually been slowing down more than expected. He summarily fired McEntarfer, accusing her of manipulating the numbers to make him look bad. An acting commissioner, William Wiatrowski, is filling in while Trump’s chosen nominee from the right-wing Heritage Foundation, E.J. Antoni, awaits Senate confirmation.
The BLS releases statistics that investors and business leaders rely on, such as the unemployment rate and the consumer price index. With McEntarfer’s firing came concern that the Trump administration would try to massage the data to make the president look better, even if it defied reality.
On Tuesday, McEntarfer explained how she had wanted to modernize the way the BLS compiles its reports for better accuracy, The Wall Street Journal reported.
In Trump’s second term, though, she said she ended up spending a lot of her time fending off efforts by the so-called Department of Government Efficiency — the group formerly headed by billionaire Elon Musk — to interfere with its operations.
She described her job as “a constant high-wire act,” per the Journal.
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“I went from big-picture reformer to being on the defensive pretty quickly,” she said.
McEntarfer also reportedly asserted that “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 added.