The administration argues Commissioner Erika McEntarfer was removed for incompetence, but the most avid consumers of the agency’s data — top economists and key figures on Wall Street — worry it was because Trump did not like what that data said.

But that is akin to what President Donald Trump did on Friday when he fired the commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics a few hours after she released a disappointing jobs report and published revisions to earlier reports that had made the labor market look stronger than it was during the spring.