Trump’s latest firing just created a massive headache for whoever has to clean up the mess he’s leaving behind

President Donald Trump’s decision to fire the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics has left the statistical agency facing a leadership crisis at a time when it already struggles with resource constraints and declining data quality. The dismissal of Commissioner Erika McEntarfer comes after Trump repeatedly claimed without evidence that the BLS “rigged” economic data to make his administration and Republicans look bad.

According to Politico, the agency has spent decades building up firewalls from political interference to preserve public confidence in its economic reports. However, it now faces massive challenges caused by years of declining survey response rates and a hiring freeze imposed by the Trump administration that has raised questions about the quality of its work.

Trump’s latest firing just created a massive headache for whoever has to clean up the mess he’s leaving behind. The next commissioner will have to address thorny data collection issues while rebuilding trust in an institution that has been thrust into the partisan spotlight, as part of Trump’s broader political agenda to reshape federal agencies. “People will be more skeptical of any changes introduced, even when those changes are appropriate,” said Erica Groshen, who led the statistical agency during the Obama administration.

Resource constraints threaten data quality and agency operations

The Bureau of Labor Statistics has been operating under severe resource limitations that predate Trump’s return to office. The agency has eliminated hundreds of indices that measure wholesale prices and stopped collecting data in smaller markets like Provo, Utah, and Buffalo, New York. In the rest of the country, the number of price inputs used to calculate the consumer price index has declined by about 15 percent.

Trump’s federal hiring freeze has made it harder for the bureau to restaff its data collection and processing teams, even though key BLS positions were excluded from the Department of Labor’s buyout offer. Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell has warned of “very mild degradation of the scope of the surveys” and expressed concern about the direction of travel for data quality.

Top economists and agency alumni have warned for years that BLS needs a revamp and more funding to ensure it remains a trusted resource for measuring nearly all aspects of the U.S. economy. “We rely on BLS to do a lot of stuff, and we don’t give it the resources to do that stuff,” said Michael Strain, director of economic policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute. Without an infusion of resources, the next commissioner “can have all the best intentions in the world,” but “they’re not going to be able to do any more than the BLS was doing before,” Groshen added.

The agency’s struggles have been compounded by several unforced errors in recent years, including a staffer operating an unsanctioned email list to respond to inquiries from “super users” and technical issues that delayed report releases. These incidents have given critics ammunition to question the agency’s reliability, adding to growing political opposition to Trump’s approach to federal institutions, even as most economists still consider federal statistical agencies like BLS the gold standard for producing timely and accurate economic reports.