Statistics Agencies Under Strain: BLS After the Firing, ONS After the Review, and Argentina's Shelved Inflation Index

On 1 August 2025, hours after the July jobs report came out, President Trump fired the Commissioner of Labor Statistics, Erika McEntarfer. The report showed 73,000 new jobs, and revisions cut the previous two months by a combined 258,000. The President said the numbers were rigged. He gave no evidence.

It took a year to replace her. The first nominee, E.J. Antoni of the Heritage Foundation, was named in August 2025 and withdrawn at the end of September. The Bureau of Labor Statistics ran under an acting commissioner, William Wiatrowski. In January 2026 the President nominated Brett Matsumoto, a BLS price-index economist since 2015 who had also worked at the Council of Economic Advisers. The Senate confirmed him by 51 votes to 47 in August 2026.

The US isn’t the only country where the official numbers have come under pressure. In Britain and Argentina, for quite different reasons, the agencies that measure the economy have had a rough two years.

The quieter US problem: less data

The firing got the headlines. The deeper strain at BLS is resources. In 2025 it stopped collecting consumer price data entirely in Lincoln, Nebraska, Provo, Utah, and Buffalo, New York, and suspended about 15% of the sample in its other 72 areas. Its own notice said current resources could no longer support the collection effort.

Then the shutdown hit. Because the October 2025 shutdown lasted 43 days, BLS couldn’t collect October’s price data at all. For the first time, a monthly consumer price index was cancelled outright. The household survey behind the unemployment rate wasn’t collected for October either. When the November jobs report came out in December, it showed unemployment at 4.6%.

Fewer data points mean noisier numbers and bigger revisions. Bigger revisions feed the kind of suspicion that surrounded McEntarfer’s dismissal.

Britain: a review that blamed the agency

The UK’s Office for National Statistics had a different crisis. Its Labour Force Survey, the basis of unemployment figures, suffered falling response rates so severe that the data became unreliable. A review by Sir Robert Devereux, published in June 2025, put most of the blame on the ONS itself. He described an organisation that pulled resources toward flagship projects, planned weakly and had leaders reluctant to hear bad news. He recommended separating the roles of National Statistician and permanent secretary.

The leadership turned over. Sir Ian Diamond resigned as National Statistician in May 2025. Darren Tierney became permanent secretary that August. On 8 September 2026 the government appointed André Loranger, Canada’s Chief Statistician, as the new National Statistician.

The survey fix is still slow. In July 2026 the ONS decided it wasn’t yet the right time to switch to its new Transformed Labour Force Survey. The earliest likely switch is November 2027.

Argentina and Canada

In Argentina, the head of the national statistics institute INDEC, Marco Lavagna, resigned on 2 February 2026 after disagreeing with the economy minister over when to introduce a new consumer price index. He wanted it right away. The minister wanted to wait until inflation had come down further. The new index was shelved with no date. Argentina’s statistics have a history here: its inflation figures were widely distrusted for years in the 2000s and 2010s.

Canada, whose chief statistician Britain just hired, has been cutting too. Statistics Canada ended 142 term and casual contracts by October 2025 under a federal review asking agencies for savings of up to 15% over three years.

What protects official numbers

The countries with the most trusted statistics tend to share a few protections. The head of the agency has a fixed term and can only be removed for cause. Release dates are published in advance and kept. Budgets are stable enough that the sample doesn’t shrink year to year.

The US has the release calendar and a fixed four-year term for its commissioner, but the President can still remove the commissioner, as 2025 showed, and the budget has shrunk. Britain has the legal independence, through the UK Statistics Authority, but let its core survey decay. Argentina shows how long it takes to rebuild trust once it’s lost.

Statistics are infrastructure. Nobody notices them until they break, and then every number becomes an argument.