President Donald Trump fired the commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, claiming that last week's jobs report "was rigged" without providing any evidence.
But former Labor Statistics officials say that the commissioner typically doesn't have a role in preparing the monthly jobs report.
"There's no way for that to happen," said William Beach, Trump's nominee to be BLS commissioner during his first term, in a Sunday interview on CNN.
"The commissioner doesn't do anything to collect the numbers. The commissioner doesn't see the numbers until Wednesday before they're published. By the time the commissioner sees the numbers, they're all prepared. They're locked into the computer system," Beach continued.
So how does the BLS collect data for the jobs report?
The process for prepari