Big businesses and Wall Street need to stand up and seek honest data

For some, the Bureau of Labor Statistics may not sound like the most exciting place to work. But many of these employees, their monthly employment reports, consumer price index and other official economic issuances are proud of data nerds. In a recent podcast, Erica Groshen, a Harvard-trained economist, served as a commissioner for the bureau from 2013 to 2017, making jokes at the agency. Question: How do you find the extrovert on BLS? A: Extroverted person is the one who looks at him your Shoes in the elevator.

Whether introverted or not, BLS employees play a crucial role in the U.S. economy, summarizing statistics used by decision makers, businesses and families to make decisions. To conquer its employment data, BLS surveys 60,000 households and 120,000 employers every month. Some respondents take some time to reply. As more data comes in, the agency updates its previous data.

On August 1, the bureau released its latest employment report, which showed weaker job growth in May and June compared to the agency’s preliminary estimates. But then Donald Trump Claiming that these numbers have been “manipulated” and abruptly fired the agency’s commissioner Erika McEntarfer, a senior labor economist who had previously worked for the Treasury Department’s Census Bureau and under the Biden administration of the White House Economic Advisory Board. Last week, Trump nominated Mcentarfer replacement: EJ Antoni, an economist at Heritage Foundation, often appeared in conservative media, and his certificate was questioned by economists in politics. On X, Dave Hebert of the Institute of Free Market Economics, Write He had been on the program with Antoni and was impressed by two things: “He couldn’t understand basic economics and the speed of the magazine he went to.”

None of this should be a complete shock. In countries run by populists, the moments that often appear, empirical reality, are reflected in official economic statistics, conflict with the regime’s rhetoric and give something. Argentina provides a famous example. In 2007, with inflation rising sharply, the Néstor Kirchner government (wife Cristina) worked to replace him in the upcoming election, appointing a senior official at the National Statistic Agency and appointing a loyalist, according to which the agency reported inflation figures.

It may be surprising that nothing like this happened in Trump’s first semester. He believes that data is only convenient and credible. He has long challenged statistics that do not support his interests. During Trump’s 2016 campaign, when Barack Obama was still in the White House, Trump claimed that the real unemployment rate was much higher than that of the BLS official in March 2017.

Job growth remains strong until the outbreak Coronavirus-19 pandemic, in early 2020, it means Trump doesn’t have much to complain about. In October 2017, he nominated William Beach as a good and conservative economist, a commissioner at BLS Beach, a former fellow at Heritage Foundation, an associate vice president of research at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, established by Charles Koch and Charles Koch and by Charles Koch and the Senate Budget Committee of Charles Koch and Republicans. Given this background, some Democratic senators have expressed concern that he would become a party commissioner, but his four-year term at the BLS ends in 2023 without any major controversy, and now he has become a criticism of Trump’s decision to fire Mcentarfer.

On the day Mcentarfer was fired, Beach described the move as “totally unfounded” and said “setting dangerous precedents.” In the follow-up interview He noted that along with CNN, there is no practical way for the commissioner to manipulate work characters, which was made by professionals at BLS. He explained that the commissioner did not see the numbers until a few days before his release. By then, the data had been locked into the computer system of the bureau. When I talked to the beach last week, he reiterated this fact and said that in the short term, “the commissioner’s ability to influence monthly numbers and their trendlines is very close to zero.” He recalls that the BLS staff prepared for them were eager to prevent the possibility of political appointees’ intervention and even thought it was so possible that they once locked the beach in a room at work. He added that he was impressed with the professionalism and dedication of the most accurate numbers demonstrated by BLS staff throughout the agency.

This is reassuring. If new commissioners try to massage monthly numbers, or change how they calculate to make them look more favorable to Trump, they will need coordinated cooperation from BLS employees. Mass strikes seem more likely. “In theory, you could fire everyone who works there and change the culture,” Heich said. “But you wouldn’t be able to make a report without their expertise.”

If results seem unlikely in the near term, there is still reason to be shocked by Trump’s latest efforts to bully government agencies that have long had no political intervention. In the vast U.S. economy, with annual GDP totaling about $30 trillion, no one can be consistent with everything, so people must rely heavily on official statistics. Economists refer to things that everyone can use and refer to public goods as public goods: consider clean air, defense, lighthouses, etc. “Federal statistics are a very classic case of the public interest,” Grosen explained in a speech on the podcast Moody’s. “It’s easy to take them for granted, but when they disappear, you’re in trouble.”

While employment reports and consumer price indexes are unlikely to disappear, the danger is that they may downgrade over time, and public trust in BLS and its products and their uniform erosion. The concerns also extended to the Bureau of Economic Analysis, which generated GDP figures and extended to the Census Bureau, the Beach said. He noted that the three statistical agencies operated independently from the White House before the Mcentarfer shot, which inspired confidence. “They are running in the bubble. Now the bubble is bursting,” the beach told me. “That’s what happened on August 1. We can’t say that these institutions have established a length relationship with the White House. This has disappeared.”

Another factor surrounding the uncertainty around BLS is that the agency has been experiencing funding pressures, shortages of staff and a decline in response to surveys based on its work, even before Trump’s intervention. According to the Center for Progress, its budget has fallen for the fifth time since 2010 after adjusting for inflation. Earlier this year, the Trump administration called for a 8% budget cut and a recruitment freeze and early retirement plan for staff, prompting the bureau to reduce its investigation efforts in several U.S. cities. The problem with the decline in survey response rates is the problem faced by other organizations, including pollsters, in recent years. For example, BLS has taken action to address that, for example, makes it easier for businesses and government agencies to respond online every month rather than via phone or fax, and by incorporating some private data into their statistics, but these efforts are hampered by funding constraints.