In announcing the firing of the government’s chief labor statistician last week, President Trump condemned the works of Erika McEntarfer as “phony.”

McEntarfer was just the 16th commissioner of the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics since the position was created by Congress in 1884 to keep track of unemployment during an ongoing depression of a very Gilded Age variety. The job is to produce consistent, reliable data that Congress and other agencies can use for setting their own policies.

What we have turned it into, however, is some kind of political rhabdomancer, an oracle on whose divinations the results of elections supposedly hang. But, like most good governance, it’s actually really boring.

McEntarfer was confirmed by the Senate by a richly bipartisan vote of 86-8 to a four-year term that began in 2024. But there’s no doubt that Trump was within his powers to fire her. All of the other counters of beans at the bureau are civil servants, but not the bean-counter in chief, who has always been a political appointee — which McEntarfer became only after more than 20 years in various statistical gigs as a federal worker bee.

Until Friday, she managed the bureau and her name was on the reports, but the numbers are churned out by a hive of statisticians and researchers working in the old Post Office building next to Washington’s Union Station. The deputy commissioner, civil servant William Wiatrowski, will again serve as acting commissioner, as he has twice before during vacancies.

We’ll see what Trump thinks of Wiatrowski and the data nerds’ August numbers when they come out on the first Friday of September. The president has vowed to pick an “exceptional replacement” for McEntarfer, and that is probably true. There will be many exceptions concerning whomever Trump sends to the Senate for confirmation to the post. In the meantime, if the August numbers are as glum as the rest of this summers’, Trump may start........

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