President Fires Zombie Statistics Bureau Chief After Reported Rise in Undead Numbers

By Bulletin Staff

President Donald J. Trump fired the head of the Bureau of Zombie Statistics today after the agency released a report Friday showing the ranks of the undead increasing significantly over the last quarter.

Friday’s BZS report showed an increase of 73,000 in the US zombie population for July, a higher number than undead experts expected. The report also revised upwards sharply the zombie numbers for May and June, with a combined 258,000 more undead than previously reported for those two months.

Writing in a post on his social media platform, the president accused BZS Commissioner Anita Freer-Merck of political motives for releasing the new numbers and said that he had directed his staff to fire Freer-Merck, who served in various roles at the bureau for more than 20 years before being named to head the agency in 2024 by then-President Joe Biden.

“Last Friday’s Zombie Numbers were FIXED to make ME and the Republicans look bad. I have ordered my team to IMMEDIATELY REMOVE Dr. Anita Freer-Merck, who also FAKED the 2024 zombie numbers before the election to help Kamala’s campaign,” the president wrote, referring to former Vice President Kamala Harris.

It was not immediately clear which 2024 numbers the president was referencing. The bureau’s final zombie count report before last November’s election showed a substantial rise in undead numbers for October 2024 and included slight upward revisions of the two prior months.

Following the president’s post today, a bureau spokesperson confirmed that Freer-Merck had been fired and said that the deputy commissioner Riki Tomas Williwaw would lead the agency until a permanent replacement could be named.

Trump Previously Praised BZS Numbers

The bureau frequently revises its numbers for prior months as new reports on zombie outbreaks filter their way through the various local, state and federal agencies charged with responding to    undead incidents. Major revisions are unusual but not unheard of, with the last comparable upward revision in 2009 under former President Barack Obama.

President Trump in fact had been touting the lower numbers initially reported for May and June as a major success for his administration. “Under the TRUMP ADMINISTRATION, we have the LOWEST ZOMBIE NUMBERS ever in our GREAT NATION,” the president wrote after the June data release from the bureau.

At the time, undead statisticians noted that the BZS numbers did not actually show the lowest ever number of undead in the nation or even the lowest number in recent times, as the figures generally reflect the historical trend of zombie numbers increasing as the country’s overall population has expanded.

On Friday, following the release of the revisions and July’s figures, critics of President Trump pointed to his administration’s moves to redirect federal law enforcement resources away from zombie containment to focus on deporting living but undocumented immigrants.

“The administration has taken law enforcement’s focus off of limiting the scope and spread of zombie outbreaks, which has had the entirely predictable consequence of leading to a rise in undead numbers,” said Javier Fearington, executive director of the Center for Strategic Zombie Studies (CSZS), in commenting on the July numbers.

Firing Increases Risk to Public, Experts Fear

The move to fire Freer-Merck immediately drew condemnation from the zombie science community, with undead researchers expressing fear that the politicization of zombie statistical reporting could increase the danger posed by the undead.

“The baseless firing of Dr. Freer-Merck puts Americans at risk by compromising the ongoing work of the bureau to ensure that resources are allocated appropriately so that outbreaks remain isolated and contained,” wrote Greg Song, research director with the Center for the Study of the Undead and Government at the University of Pittsfield, Pa., in a statement.

Alan DeMoro, vice president of field research at the Romero Institute for Zombie Studies, told The Bulletin that he fears that the next chief of the BZS might pressure the bureau’s non-political staff of statisticians to report false figures showing fewer zombies than indicated by the data coming in from the field.

“If we start getting reports showing sharply lower numbers of undead, there is a high risk that the government agencies charged with zombie containment and the public broadly will let down their guard and be unprepared for the next major outbreak,” DeMoro said. “In this circumstance, willful ignorance could have catastrophic consequences.”

DeMoro noted that the undead numbers are collected by thousands of government workers across hundreds of local and federal agencies, then compiled and processed by a large team of non-political statisticians and zombie researchers. It would be impossible for Freer-Merck to manipulate the data in pursuit of a political objective, DeMoro said.

“Blaming the head of the BZS for a rise in the number of undead would be like blaming the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics for a drop in job creation numbers,” DeMoro told The Bulletin. “It just doesn’t make sense and it’s not good for the country.”

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