“Instead of helping people get good jobs, Donald Trump just fired the statistician who reported bad jobs data that the wanna-be king doesn’t like,” Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren said on X.

Other Democrats likened Trump’s demand to actions taken by totalitarian governments. New Mexico Sen. Martin Heinrich called the move “pure Soviet shit.”

Sen. Bernie Sanders, ranking member on the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee that oversees the Department of Labor, said Trump’s statement reminds him of “what authoritarians do.” Sanders is an Independent but caucuses with Democrats.

“Today’s jobs report shows what many Americans already knew: despite record highs in the stock market, the “economy” is not working for ordinary people,” Sanders wrote on X. “Rather than accept reality & try to address it, Trump chooses to fire the bearers of bad news.”

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Some Republicans reacted warmly to Trump’s call and agreed with the president’s skepticism over the accuracy of the department’s jobs numbers. Sen. Rick Scott, a Republican from Florida, called for “somebody non-political” to replace McEntarfer.

“I’d like somebody that just put out the darn numbers,” he said in an interview on Friday. “All the numbers we get up here are all massaged because somebody has an agenda.”

Sen. Roger Marshall from Kansas, who joined 85 other senators to confirm McEntarfer last year, praised the president for seeking to fire her.

“I have been raising concerns for the past year about inaccurate job numbers put out by Dr. Erika McEntarfer. Her cooked-up numbers have misled the American people for too long,” he wrote on X.

Jacob Wendler contributed to this report.