Here’re other prior 2 month cumulative revisions, normalized by employment (after all, the country has been growing for the past 100 years):
Source: Abecasis, Walker, “US Daily: Q&A on the Revisions in the July Employment Report,” Goldman Sachs, August 2, 2025.
Using the Trump criterion, the following BLS Commissioners should’a been fired.
- Ewan Clague, August 1946–September 1965
- Arthur Ross, October 1965–July 1968
- Geoffrey H. Moore, March 1969–January 1973
- Julius Shiskin, July 1973–October 1978
- Janet L. Norwood, May 1979–December 1991
- William W. Beach, March 2019–March 2023
- Erika McEntarfer, January 2024–August 2025
I see that Trump did not fire Bill Beach, but did fire Erika McEntarfer. For a complete list of Sentate-confirmed BLS Commissioners, see here (there were 4 BLS Commissioners that did not have a larger (by percentage) revision).
Trump’s other complaint is a flat out lie that the 2024 downward correction occurred after the election. In fact, it occurred two months before the election in August 2024. By Trump’s reasoning, McEntarfer must have been trying to make Biden look bad before the election by revising downward.
But there’s more. The August 2024 correction was an annual downward revision covering the year from March 2023 to March 2024. For 10 of those months of higher employment numbers that were later revised down, Trump’s commissioner Bill Beach was responsible. So by Trump’s reasoning his own Republican BLS commissioner was juicing the data upward to make Biden look good.
Well now Trump has made very clear to everyone in the BLS that if you bring him bad news, you will be fired. How could this not affect everyone from top to bottom? The scariest might be effect on CPI which is used for everything from Social Security COLA, to TIPS and I-bonds, and throughout the tax code for computing changes to tax brackets and deductions, and business investment decisions. Accurate CPI data is at the foundation of the entire financial system.