A handful of Republican senators have publicly expressed concern after Donald Trump fired the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics on Friday after the agency released a jobs report that showed a notable slowdown in hiring in the U.S.
Via NBC News:
• Sen. Cynthia Lummis (R-WY): “If the president is firing the statistician because he doesn’t like the numbers but they are accurate, then that’s a problem. It’s not the statistician’s fault if the numbers are accurate and that they’re not what the president had hoped for.”
• Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC): “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.”
• Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY):“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. I’m going to look into it, but first impression is that you can’t really make the numbers different or better by firing the people doing the counting.”
Democratic senators have also spoken out against McEntarfer’s firing as well with Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) accusing Trump of acting like “someone who imitates authoritarian leaders.”
Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) called McEntarfer’s dismissal “the stuff of fascist dictatorships.”
