Republicans tell Trump to ‘grow up' after he sacks data chief
The president said on Friday he would remove Erika McEntarfer as commissioner of the Bureau of Labour Statistics (BLS) shortly after government figures indicated the economy was performing worse than expected.
The move has prompted a rare backlash against Mr Trump from members of his own party.
Cynthia Lummis, a Republican senator for Wyoming, told NBC News that deciding to sack Ms McEntarfer before establishing the accuracy of the employment figures was 'kind of impetuous'.
'If the president is firing the statistician because he doesn't like the numbers but they are accurate, then that's a problem,' she continued.
'It's not the statistician's fault if the numbers are accurate and that they're not what the president had hoped for.'
Thom Tillis, who represents North Carolina, said: 'If she was just fired because the president or whoever decided to fire the director just did it because they didn't like the numbers, they ought to grow up'.
In the past, Mr Trump has taken an uncompromising attitude to critics in his own party, publicly threatening to back primary challenges to replace them with loyalists. Mr Tillis said in June that he would not run for re-election.
Rand Paul, a Kentucky senator and former presidential primary contender, raised concerns about the politicisation of government data.
'We have to look somewhere for objective statistics. When the people providing the statistics are fired, it makes it much harder to make judgments that you know, the statistics won't be politicised,' he said.
'I'm going to look into it, but [my] first impression is that you can't really make the numbers different or better by firing the people doing the counting.'
Democrats have also condemned the president's move. Chuck Schumer, the party's leader in the Senate, criticised Mr Trump's 'shoot the messenger' response in a speech on Friday.
Mr Trump has long been suspicious of the BLS, claiming last year that it inflated the jobs numbers during former president Joe Biden's administration in an attempt to swing the election for the Democrats.
He announced via social media on Friday that he was sacking Ms McEntarfer, labelling her a 'Biden political appointee' even though she is a career civil servant and was confirmed by a bipartisan vote in January 2024.
Among those who voted to confirm her were former senators JD Vance, now the US vice-president, and Marco Rubio, the secretary of state.
Some Republicans have backed the president's move, including Roger Marshall, a Kansas senator, who was one of the 85 senators who confirmed her last year.
'Her cooked-up numbers have misled the American people for too long,' he claimed.
The US created just 73,000 new jobs in July, considerably fewer than the predicted 110,000, while the figures for May and June were slashed by 258,000 combined, according to the BLS report released on Friday.
Mr Trump hit out at the bureau as stock markets tumbled, branding the figures revision a 'major mistake' and adding: 'Important numbers like this must be fair and accurate, they can't be manipulated for political purposes.'
Ms McEntarfer would be replaced with 'someone much more competent and qualified', he said, insisting the economy was 'BOOMING'.
For now, BLS deputy commissioner William Wiatrowski is serving as acting commissioner.
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