A smattering of Republicans have aligned with the opposition party in denouncing President Trump's firing of the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics in response to Friday's bleak jobs report. Democrats called the firing corrupt and a totalitarian move, the Hill reports, with Sen. Brian Schatz saying the dismissal of Erika McEntarfer is "the stuff of fascist dictatorships" and Sen. Chris Murphy posting: "Truth being replaced by propaganda. This is what the Soviets did." But there were Republicans who didn't pull punches, either. A sampling of the GOP reaction, supportive and not:
- Sen. Thom Tillis: "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," the North Carolina Republican said, per the Guardian.
- Sen. Roger Marshall: "I have been raising concerns for the past year about inaccurate job numbers put out by Dr. Erika McEntarfer. Her cooked-up numbers have misled the American people for too long," the Kansas Republican posted, per Politico.
- Sen. Rand Paul: "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 politicized," the Kentucky Republican said.
- Sen. Cynthia Lummis: "It's not the statistician's fault if the numbers are accurate and that they're not what the president had hoped for," the Wyoming Republican said, per NBC News.
- Sen. Rick Scott: "I'd like somebody that just put out the darn numbers. All the numbers we get up here are all massaged because somebody has an agenda," the Florida Republican said.
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People in the field also objected, per NBC. William Beach, whom Trump appointed to the job in his first term, posted that the firing was "totally groundless." A statement by the Friends of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which Beach signed, said: "The process of obtaining the numbers is decentralized by design to avoid opportunities for interference. The BLS uses the same proven, transparent, reliable process to produce estimates every month. Every month, BLS revises the prior two months' employment estimates to reflect slower-arriving, more-accurate information." Paul Schroeder, executive director of the Council of Professional Associations on Federal Statistics, said that not only does McEntarfer's firing "undermine the integrity of federal economic statistics, but it also politicizes data which need to remain independent and trustworthy."
- ABC News traces Trump's history of bashing the bureau's jobs data to 2016 here.
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