“You can’t really make the numbers different or better by firing the people doing the counting,” said Sen. Rand Paul

Several Republican senators and right-leaning experts have criticized Trump for the decision.

“If the president is firing the statistician because he doesn’t like the numbers but they are accurate, then that’s a problem,” Sen. Cynthia Lummis (R-Wy.) told The Guardian. “It’s not the statistician’s fault if the numbers are accurate and that they’re not what the president had hoped for.”

“If she was just fired because the president or whoever decided to fire the director just … because they didn’t like the numbers, they ought to grow up,” said Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.).

“We have to look somewhere for objective statistics,” Sen. Rand Paul, (R-Ky.) told NBC News. “When the people providing the statistics are fired, it makes it much harder to make judgments that you know, the statistics won’t be politicized.”