No Matter Who Is President, Don’t Trust Government Data
Figures Lie and Liars Figure.
Figures Lie and Liars Figure.
President Trump caused a stir last Friday after he fired the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) hours after it released a weaker-than-expected jobs report. In a post on his social media site Truth Social, the president blamed the Biden-appointed BLS commissioner, Dr. Erika McEntarfer, for manipulating jobs numbers to prop up Democrats and make his administration look bad. He promised to appoint someone “much more competent and qualified.”
Many of his critics sought to frame the move as a childish yet dangerous attempt to brazenly warp reality to Trump’s liking. Even outlets that are generally sympathetic to most of the president’s domestic economic policies warned that the move represented the same kind of politically perilous denial of economic reality that doomed the Biden administration while also threatening to lower trust in the federal government’s economic data.
As they’ve done earlier in the wake of Trump attacks on the federal judiciary and Federal Reserve, establishment “experts” rushed to reassure the public about the “independence” and “nonpolitical” nature of the BLS and the federal data collection apparatus more broadly. An effort was made to portray these federal data collectors as rigorous statisticians obsessed only with the truth and to assure readers that there is no evidence for the kind of brazen data editing that Trump suggested was taking place in his Truth Social post.
But while Trump’s assertion of BLS data manipulation was characteristically imprecise, there’s no question that the political establishment has been…