The Week: Trump Attempts to Work the Statistics

• Who needed just the one moon anyway?

• There’s no way around it: Donald Trump had a tantrum and harmed the statistical apparatus of the U.S. government. The Bureau of Labor Statistics is just about the least political government agency there is, full of stats nerds who have established a sterling record of revising jobs numbers in whichever direction the data say under presidents of both parties. Their task has become harder in recent years because the response rate to the employer survey used for the jobs report has declined steeply since Covid. Trump’s appointee as BLS commissioner in 2019, William Beach, has begged Congress for funding to modernize the survey, and an advisory task force was studying how other countries have improved their survey response rates. Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick disbanded that task force in February, and Congress hasn’t approved more funding. Trump got a jobs report he didn’t like and fired Beach’s successor, Erika McEntarfer. Trump is shooting the messenger of bad economic news, not unlike when China discontinues inconvenient data series that make the Communist Party look bad. The BLS will continue to do its work, but now under a justified cloud of speculation that it is manipulating data to avoid Trump’s wrath. And the economy itself is what it is, no matter how the statistics are reported.

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• Who needed just the one moon anyway?

• There’s no way around it: Donald Trump had a tantrum and harmed the statistical apparatus of the U.S. government. The Bureau of Labor Statistics is just about the least political government agency there is, full of stats nerds who have established a sterling record of revising jobs numbers in whichever direction the data say under presidents of both parties. Their task has become harder in recent years because the response rate to the employer survey used for the jobs report has declined steeply since Covid. Trump’s appointee as BLS commissioner in 2019, William Beach, has begged Congress for funding to modernize the survey, and an advisory task force was studying how other countries have improved their survey response rates. Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick disbanded that task force in February, and Congress hasn’t approved more funding. Trump got a jobs report he didn’t like and fired Beach’s successor, Erika McEntarfer. Trump is shooting the messenger of bad economic news, not unlike when China discontinues inconvenient data series that make the Communist Party look bad. The BLS will continue to do its work, but now under a justified cloud of speculation that it is manipulating data to avoid Trump’s wrath. And the economy itself is what it is, no matter how the statistics are reported.