The previous Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) commissioner, Erika McEntarfer, on Tuesday made her first public remarks since she was fired by President Trump final month following a poor jobs report and substantial revisions to earlier information.
Talking on the Levy Economics Institute at Bard School, her alma mater, McEntarfer recounted her expertise studying she had been fired and warned of the potential financial penalties of her firing, in line with a number of information studies.
“August 1 was like any other first Friday of the month when the job numbers come out, and my quiet and usually obscure little corner [of] the government goes about its business of telling political leaders what these data tell us about the state of the economy,” she mentioned throughout her lecture, in line with the studies.
“Except, by the end of that day, I had been very publicly fired by the president of the United States and was on my way to becoming a household name. It was quite a day, to say the least,” she continued.
McEntarfer mentioned she first discovered she had been fired when she was contacted by a reporter asking for touch upon Trump’s social media put up calling for her firing.
“To be honest, I didn’t actually believe I had been fired,” McEntarfer mentioned. She then checked her inbox and noticed a message 20 minutes earlier from the White Home informing her that she was “terminated effective immediately.”
When Trump fired McEntarfer, he accused her of falsifying jobs numbers to drawback him politically. Economists throughout the political spectrum have mentioned that type of falsification could be unimaginable, noting revisions to job numbers are routine and mirror delayed reporting from employers.
“I can vouch for the accuracy and independence of the work of the agency up until the moment I was fired,” McEntarfer, a Biden appointee, mentioned on Tuesday.
McEntarfer additionally warned of the hazard of interfering with the independence of BLS.
“Firing your chief statistician is a dangerous step,” she mentioned on the lecture. “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.”
“Messing with economic data is like messing with the traffic lights and turning the sensors off,” she added. “Cars don’t know where to go, traffic backs up at intersections.”
She additionally famous that different international locations have pushed out statisticians due to disappointing information and have suffered the results, pointing to Argentina, Greece and Turkey.
“The resulting loss of trust in economic statistics led these countries to worsening economic crises, higher inflation and higher borrowing costs,” she mentioned.
