Since Erika McEntarfer was appointed as the Commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) by President Joe Biden in January 2024, the agency’s job reports have faced significant scrutiny for substantial revisions, raising questions about the accuracy of initial estimates. Notably, in August 2024, the BLS reported an overstatement of job growth by 818,000 for the 12 months prior to March 2024, a revision that marked one of the largest in recent history. Additionally, the July 2025 jobs report under McEntarfer’s leadership showed a mere 73,000 jobs added, far below economists’ expectations of at least 100,000, and included a downward revision of 258,000 jobs for May and June 2025 combined, with May’s figures dropping from 144,000 to 19,000 and June’s from 147,000 to 14,000. These significant adjustments have fueled criticism that the BLS, under McEntarfer, has consistently overstated initial job numbers, only to correct them later with substantial downward revisions.

Critics, including President Donald Trump, have pointed to these revisions as evidence of incompetence or potential political manipulation, particularly highlighting the timing of overly optimistic reports before the 2024 presidential election. For instance, Trump claimed that McEntarfer “faked” job numbers to boost Vice President Kamala Harris’s election chances, citing the 818,000-job overstatement and subsequent revisions in August and September 2024 totaling 112,000 jobs. The White House echoed this sentiment, stating that McEntarfer’s tenure was marked by a “lengthy history of inaccuracies” that eroded public trust in the BLS, with technical errors and leaks of sensitive information further compounding concerns. A Washington Post report from August 2024 noted issues with delayed data releases and communication mishaps within the agency, which critics argue undermined confidence in the BLS’s ability to produce reliable data under McEntarfer’s leadership.

However, defenders of McEntarfer, including economists and former BLS commissioners, argue that these revisions are a normal part of the BLS’s complex, survey-based reporting process, which involves sampling over 100,000 businesses and refining estimates as more data becomes available. They emphasize that the BLS operates with significant autonomy to ensure data integrity, and the decentralized process makes political manipulation highly unlikely. Former BLS Commissioner William Beach and others have called accusations of falsified data “baseless,” noting that McEntarfer, a respected labor economist with over 20 years of federal experience, simply reported what the data showed. Economists like Mark Zandi from Moody’s Analytics have praised the BLS’s data as meeting the “highest standard,” suggesting that the large revisions reflect the challenges of real-time estimation in a dynamic economy rather than incompetence or bias. Despite these defenses, the scale of the revisions—averaging 66,000 jobs downward per month from January to May 2025—has intensified skepticism about the reliability of BLS job numbers under McEntarfer’s tenure.