Lies, damned lies, and statistics
What does the firing of the Bureau of Labor Statistics commissioner mean for the future of the truth in America?
It’s one lost job. Why does it seem to matter so much?
Donald Trump firing federal employees for questionable reasons is nothing new at this point, but this week’s termination of Bureau of Labor Statistics Commissioner Erika McEntarfer has struck many observers as something new.
The fact that she was let go because she “faked” the revised jobs numbers for May and June to present a dismal picture of the American economy and wound the president politically is better understood in the context of the regime’s other recent attacks on culture and the truth —it’s just that this time Trump’s ire has aimed at something close to the heart of capitalism that even many on the right hold close to their hearts: reliable economic data. And that’s a real vibe shift, as William Beach, a former commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, who was appointed by Trump, told ABC News:
"If you don't know what the economy is doing… then how does your central bank work? How do your investors work? How do people really make plans for what they're going to do in the future?"
The fact that investors have outsize importance in American life, or that economic issues seem “real” to critics across the partisan divide in a way that, say, huge threats to the public like closing down the Department of Education, cutting off foreign aid, or ending investment in lifesaving vaccine technology have not is a topic for another time. But that this attack on truth and the telling of it has touched the economy — something everyone purports to take seriously — means that it’s touched a nerve, and the reaction to it has been very negative across the board, even on the right, as Philip Klein writes for National Review:
Trump is complaining about the downward revisions to prior months’ numbers. But that means that for several months of his presidency, the BLS has been overstating job growth in his favor.
The baseless charges will help undermine public confidence in yet another American institution, which will also create less certainty for investors.
Some commentators have pointed out that Trump has the kernel of a point — late revisions to the BLS reports are common and frustrating. But there’s no evidence this is the result of manipulation. Economic data changes quickly and is at the core of real-world decision-making, which means the experts who work with it and depend on it are used to acting on incomplete initial reports and don’t see revisions as a problem, but as part of the process of improving the results. Researchers are almost always aiming at a moving target, and revisions based on updated data are a fundamental part of how knowledge is built.
As former BLS official Michael Horrigan told NPR’s “All Things Considered”:
[T]hese are very vital economic data. And the Federal Reserve, for example, policymakers in general, often have to make decisions based on the data for, say, in this case, July with those numbers coming out in August. And if we waited three months for the July numbers, it may be too late to make critical decisions in terms of the movement of the economy
It’s simply hard to get good data collected and collated in a timely fashion, and large-scale economic data (the kind the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics collects) depends on voluntary surveys — some large businesses can report numbers quickly, while smaller ones take more time.
Experts have been pointing out just how hard it is to collect basic economic numbers for a while (revisions have long been an issue — but they happen because data can be slow to come in. It’s hard to get people to fill out voluntary surveys in a timely fashion, and better sources might be located after the first publication, and that’s how the process actually works.
It’s certainly possible that Donald Trump just misunderstands the way math and science are done — he has routinely claimed implausible savings figures for his proposals, after all. But he’s said repeatedly that firing McEntarfer was a response to what he saw as a political attack against him — a political act. And that sounds a lot like the reaction of power to being confronted with an uncomfortable truth. As David Madland of the Center for American Progress writes:
Trump’s actions weren’t based on a methodological disagreement. He fired McEntarfer because he doesn’t like the U.S. government releasing accurate numbers about the state of our economy — at least not when they make him look bad.
Experts have warned that the politicization of U.S. government economic data invites a financial crisis — investing in the U.S. might become too risky a bet.
But writing in Fortune, Jeffrey Sonnefeld of the Yale School of Management raises a scarier point. He puts Trump’s animus against the BLS numbers in the context of his other crusades against the truth in favor of alternative facts, from his mystifying tariff formula to his longtime obsession with crowd sizes. But for him, McEntarfer’s dismissal signals the kind of manipulation of critical statistics that puts the United States squarely in the company of autocracies, the kind of places that purge dissenting voices, or even simply truthful ones:
It’s difficult to look beyond Trump’s longstanding admiration of Russian President Vladimir Putin. As we’ve documented in the past, Putin has a history of rewriting inconvenient narratives. Rosstat, the nation’s official statistics agency, has a longstanding record of manipulating economic data to please Putin. It goes to great lengths to amend poor figures and hide unflattering statistics under pressure from the Kremlin, especially since Putin’s Ukraine invasion in 2022. The Russian agency has been “switching to new methodologies” and “recalculating data” with alarming frequency. Then there’s the overt political interference—Putin has fired the heads of Rosstat, transferred control of the agency to political appointees, and appointed a blatant political pick as deputy economic minister…
Free markets cannot function without trusted information. That’s why foreign direct investment into Russia has plummeted from over $100 billion to zero, and capital markets activity has been virtually frozen over, with barely any IPOs and little global interest in Russian securities.
The firing comes alongside potentially disastrous moves like Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s conspiracy-theory driven abandonment of federal investment in research into mRNA vaccine technology, the Environmental Protection Agency’s refusal to recognize the reality of climate change, the shrinking legitimacy of the courts, and the brewing gerrymandering war between the states that threatens democratic participation even further in the run-up to the 2026 midterm elections.
With all of that happening, it’s not just institutional investors who might lose faith in the United States. The American public began the Trump era with very little trust in the federal government to begin with, with barely 20 percent of Americans responding to a 2024 Pew Research Center survey that they felt the government would do the right thing most of the time.
In his 1973 book Legitimation Crisis, the German sociologist Jürgen Habermas described what happens to a society whose government fails in “maintaining the requisite level of mass loyalty,” and can no longer build or maintain the systems that let it achieve its intended goals: the public loses trust in its institutions. A legitimation crisis doesn’t necessarily mean a state is going to collapse — just that it loses its ability to govern effectively or otherwise do the things people expect of a government. And as the Editorial Board of The New York Times has pointed out, the McEntarfer firing is another signal of exactly that:
As the political scientist James Scott has argued, states need standardized and legible information to write good rules and to make good decisions. The original meaning of the word “statistics” is “information about the state.” Without statistics, a state cannot operate effectively. It cannot establish good rules. It cannot make good decisions.
Experts have argued that the U.S. has been experiencing just such a crisis for years, if not decades, going back to the financial crisis of 2008, or even to Reagan’s identification of government as the problem, and a crisis of faith in government is exactly what those sinking poll numbers have been describing. But with a federal government unable or unwilling to fix the problem (or set on making it worse), it’s up to the people to demand better and to stand up for what’s true.
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Tomorrow, Thursday, August 7, at 12:30 p.m. Eastern, we’ll speak with historian and scholar of genocide Omer Bartov.
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Fortunately there is still good state-level data, but how long will it be before red states start cooking the books if they aren't already?
Team Trump understands and then exacerbates widespread distrust of government in order to exploit the chaos this produces for its own ends. I think you are gesturing to longstanding issues of distrust in government that may have some justification over past decades. But Team Trump has so very little interest in what those employment figures actually mean for real people or how government could make a positive difference if it were committed to a wider vision of the public good. And as it destroys trust in more and more of the institutions designed to hold the nation together, so it increasingly presents itself as the only alternative - the only one to trust. Gaslighting at its finest.