By Elisabeth Buchwald, CNN

Annandale-on-Hudson, New York (CNN) — When the July jobs report was first released on August 1, it didn’t feel any different for Erika McEntarfer, former commissioner at the Bureau of Labor Statistics, compared to when other employment reports came out.

But that quickly changed after she learned that President Donald Trump had taken to Truth Social to publicly announce her firing. Soon, she was on her way to “becoming a household name,” McEntarfer said Tuesday in her first public remarks since her departure from the BLS.

McEntarfer was fired after the BLS reported that the US economy added just 73,000 jobs in July and the monthly totals for May and June were revised down by a combined 258,000 jobs. Trump claimed, without evidence, that the disappointing jobs report had been “rigged.”

Her lecture at the Levy Economics Institute at Bard College, her alma mater, comes as questions swirl about the integrity of government data as Trump has sought greater control of the agency and tariffs appear to be hurting the economy.

Speaking to a crowd of fellow alumni, students, professors and reporters, McEntarfer said Tuesday that she only learned of her firing when a reporter reached out to her for comment following a Trump post on Truth Social announcing her termination. She didn’t believe it at first, she said.

Then she noticed an earlier email from the White House Presidential Personnel Office stating only the following:

“Dr. McEntarfer: On behalf of President Donald J. Trump, I am writing to inform you that your position at the Bureau of Labor Statistics has been terminated, effective immediately. Thank you for your service.”

“Firing your chief statistician is a dangerous step,” she said. “That’s an attack on the independence of an institution arguably as important as the Federal Reserve for economic stability. It has serious economic consequences, but that they would do this with no warning — it made no sense.”

“Messing with economic data is like messing with the traffic lights and turning the sensors off. Cars don’t know where to go, traffic backs up at intersections,” she said, a nod to the concerns many economists have raised since her firing.

Before her firing, McEntarfer’s biggest concern with the monthly jobs reports and other economic reports the BLS publishes was funding shortfalls that made it harder to conduct surveys that inform the data, she said. That’s been especially true as response rates to the agency’s surveys have fallen. But that has not impacted the accuracy of the data, she said.

“But after the events of the last six weeks, I’m afraid we have to fear for the (data) dependence of the agencies themselves.”

Entirely caught off guard

Before the release of any jobs report during her time at the BLS, McEntarfer and her team would brief members of the White House a day before the data is made public.

McEntarfer said she “did not get the sense” that anything was wrong when briefing the White House last month. She fielded what she considers “normal” questions when economists are trying to make sense of new data, she said.

She acknowledged that the downward jobs revisions from prior months’ employment reports, which were included in the July jobs report, were unusually large. This prompted her to devote more time during the briefing to explain why that was the case, she said.

Such revisions, however, are considered a feature and not a bug of economic data, which is frequently revised – especially as more comprehensive information becomes readily available – to provide a clearer, more accurate picture of the dynamics in play.

On Tuesday, McEntarfer said that late-responding firms were the principal reason for the negative revision that preceded her firing. That dynamic was explained by McEntarfer and her staff during their monthly pre-jobs report briefing to the White House.

She told White House economists that revisions as large as the May and June jobs data tend to occur “when the economy slows,” she said. During the briefing, White House officials asked her: Was the skew disproportionately among small firms, and when was the last time this happened?

“It was a pretty broad-based, negative skew,” she said, noting that the last time this happened was in the early months of the pandemic. Businesses were likely responding late to the survey “because they’re just too busy trying to stay alive.”

This story has been updated with additional context and developments.

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CNN’s Alicia Wallace contributed reporting.