Donald Trump’s attempt to replace the nonpartisan chief of the Bureau of Labor Statistics with a woefully underqualified MAGA extremist has advocates for women in the workplace worried about how the administration could potentially manipulate data to serve its political agenda.
As Alana Samuels wrote earlier this month for Time magazine, there’s already evidence that the Trump administration’s policies — particularly its mass deportation agenda and strict return-to-work requirements for federal employees — have contributed to a mass exodus of women from the workplace in the first several months of Trump’s second term. Some women’s advocates fear this trend could worsen — and that a MAGA-fied BLS could cook the books or simply withhold data to hide the true scope of this growing problem.
“This is economic sabotage wrapped in bureaucratic language,” Noreen Farrell, executive director of the pro-woman workplace advocacy group Equal Rights Advocates, told MSNBC. “Eliminating the jobs report while women flee the workforce isn’t incompetence, it’s the intended outcome of their war on civil rights.”
On the campaign trail last year, Trump proclaimed himself a “protector” of American women. On Thursday, Farrell explained to me that the president’s disruptions at the BLS could allow him to obscure his failure to protect the careers of working women.
“The data over the past six months — from our perspective and our work — show that 200,000 women have left the U.S. workforce since January 2025. Labor force participation for mothers with young children has plummeted 3%, as Fortune just reported,” Farrell said. “Return-to-office mandates have doubled, and I think the administration knows that these numbers expose their failed policies. They really are alarming to the average working American. And threatening to just disband and no longer issue [BLS] reports — it’s just a way to hide data that is harmful to the administration.”
Using a feminist lens to analyze problems in the modern-day workplace, Farrell’s organization relies on BLS data to assess issues like claims of pay inequality and whether women are being funneled into certain low-paying jobs. Farrell is concerned that the administration’s potential manipulation of labor data could obscure or hasten the discrimination or subjugation of female workers during a time of rising misogyny.
As examples of that trend, Farrell pointed to some MAGA allies’ promotion of the idea that women should lose some rights (such as voting); conservatives’ assault on diversity, equity and inclusion policies; and the apparent metastasis of anti-feminist views in recent years among conservatives — and even among some liberal men. This anti-women ethos, she said, has opened the door for the administration to launch a full-fledged assault on women workers.
“What we have seen over the past six months is everyone saying the quiet parts out loud: ‘Women do not deserve equity, and they certainly don’t deserve to be in the workplace,’” Farrell said. “We see that not only from sort of the trends we’re seeing with women being pushed out, but a complete abdication of policy progress on child care, paid family leave, pay equity, addressing sexual harassment in the workplace.”
She warned that Trump’s threat to the BLS is “extraordinarily dangerous” and could turn workforce data into an “a tool of sexism.”
“First they dismantled workplace protections. Then they gutted DEI programs. Now, as women abandon careers in record numbers, they want to stop counting,” she said. “This is what systematic discrimination looks like in 2025.”