WASHINGTON: President Donald Trump said on Friday he had ordered the firing of a key economic official, accusing her of manipulating employment data for political reasons after a report showed cracks emerging in the US jobs market.

Job growth missed expectations last month, Labour Department data showed, and revisions to hiring figures in recent months brought them to the weakest levels since the Covid-19 pandemic.

Trump lashed out at the department’s Commissioner of Labour Statistics, Erika McEntarfer, after the report, charging that she had “faked” jobs data to boost Democrats’ chances of victory in the presidential election last year.

“McEntarfer said there were only 73,000 Jobs added (a shock!) but, more importantly, that a major mistake was made by them, 258,000 jobs downward, in the prior two months,” Trump wrote in a Truth Social post, referring to the latest data for July.

“Similar things happened in the first part of the year, always to the negative,” he added.

But he insisted that the world’s biggest economy was “booming” under his leadership.

The United States added 73,000 jobs last month, while the unemployment rate rose to 4.2 per cent from 4.1pc, said the Department of Labour on Friday.

Hiring numbers for May were revised down from 144,000 to 19,000. The figure for June was shifted from 147,000 to 14,000.

This was notably lower than job creation levels in recent years. During the pandemic, the economy lost jobs.

Published in Dawn, Aug 2nd, 2025