Trump's Trials - 'Without any precedent': former BLS head on fired labor official, 'rigged' claims

Episode Date: August 4, 2025

NPR's Leila Fadel speaks with former Bureau of Labor Statistics commissioner Erica Groshen about the firing of one of her successors over the latest jobs numbers. Support NPR and hear every episode of Trump's Terms sponsor-free with NPR+. Sign up at plus.npr.org.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

You're listening to Trump's Terms from NPR. I'm Scott Detmer. We're going to be doing all sorts of things nobody ever thought was even possible. President Trump has brought back strength to the White House. We can't just ignore the president's desires. This will be an entirely different country in a short period of time. Every episode of Trump's Terms, we bring you NPR's latest coverage of the 47th president, with a focus on actions and policies he is pursuing on his own terms and in the process, taking the presidency into uncharted territory.

Today's story starts right after this. I'm Michelle Martin. And I'm Leila Fadl. When disabled job numbers were released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics last week, numbers that didn't back up President Trump's claim that the economy is doing great, he reacted immediately by firing the Bureau of Labor Statistics commissioner, Erica McIntarfer. He explained it by saying this.

I believe the numbers were phony just like they were before the election and there were other times. So you know what I did? I fired her. And you know what? I did the right thing. And like many claims from the president about phony or manipulated data, he gave zero evidence for why he believes that. So we reached out to someone who's worked a lot with those job numbers to understand how hard it would be to just rig them. Erica Groshen is a former BLS commissioner serving from 2013 to 2017 and she joins me now. Hello. Hello, Leila. What was your first reaction when the president just fired

the commissioner after the jobs report came out? Well, I had actually speculated lightly that such a thing could happen, but frankly it's without any modern precedence. Even as I said it, it was hard for me to believe it would happen. As a former commissioner, is it possible to just make the numbers up? No. The commissioner does not see any numbers before their final, so they are already baked in the cake. The commissioner sees them before they're released and mostly approves the narrative that accompanies

the table with the numbers. But the commissioner has no role in estimating the numbers in those tables. The commissioner doesn't have access to any of the systems and the data that go into the numbers. So a lot of people would know if the commissioner were fussing with the data. And the culture of the BLS is such that you'd immediately get pushback, resignations, whistleblowers, something like that. So it sounds like it would be nearly impossible without, as you pointed out, many people knowing to just phony up the data.

Absolutely. That's intentional. That's not an accident. And when the BLS changes its methodology in any way, it publishes papers about it, it explains why it did it. All of that is very transparent. Let's talk about the public trust in the numbers. The US government does put out a lot of data

from climate to immigration to jobs. And we've seen a lot of moments where the government and the president have questioned what are supposed to be bipartisan numbers. I mean, what are the bigger implications when public data are questioned or impugned by the administration itself? Well, this information is infrastructure for our economy as much as roads and bridges are. It facilitates the decisions that we all have to make. And in our country, we believe in pushing decision-making down to the lowest possible level to the firms, to the families, to the local decision-makers.

And they need to have trustworthy data. And when we take that away from them, they're going to make what's technically known as lousy decisions. And they are going to be worse off and the whole country is going to be worse off. That's Erica Groshin, former commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Thank you for your time. Thank you for having me on. And before we wrap up, a thank you to our NPR Plus supporters, who hear each show without

sponsored messages, and of course, who help protect independent journalism. If you are not a supporter yet, you can visit plus.npr.org to find out how you can get a ton of podcast perks across dozens of NPR shows, like bonus episodes, exclusive merchandise, and more. Again, that's plus.npr.org. I'm Scott Detro. Thanks for listening to Trump's Terms from NPR. It doesn't matter if you're a fan or not.

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