Trump orders firing of US official as cracks emerge in jobs market

President Donald Trump said Friday he has ordered the firing of a key economic official, accusing her of manipulating employment data for political reasons after a new report showed cracks in the U.S. jobs market.

U.S. job growth missed expectations in July, Labor Department data showed, and revisions to hiring figures in recent months brought them to the weakest levels since the Covid-19 pandemic.

Without providing evidence, Trump lashed out at the department's commissioner of labor statistics, writing on social media that the jobs numbers "were RIGGED in order to make the Republicans, and ME, look bad."

In a separate post on his Truth Social platform, he charged that Commissioner Erika McEntarfer had "faked" jobs data to boost Democrats' chances of victory in the recent presidential election.

"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 said, referring to the latest data for July.

"Similar things happened in the first part of the year, always to the negative," Trump said, insisting that the world's biggest economy was "booming" under his leadership.

He later told reporters, "We need people that we can trust," accusing the economic official of inflating hiring figures under former President Joe Biden's administration.

AFP