President Trump’s shocking move Friday to fire the Bureau of Labor Statistics commissioner wasn’t the first time we’ve seen the president and those in his orbit express their unhappiness with economic data.
But it clearly marked an escalation — both in the abrupt dismissal as well as Trump’s repeated evidence-free statements that it was because the underlying numbers are “rigged.”
It’s also part of an effort that has spanned Trump’s second term to, at the very least, shape how the government’s giant and influential stream of data is presented to markets and to the public.
The project has long been a mix of both ideology and political expedience. And it is likely to inform the coming pick for a replacement for the now-fired Erika McEntarfer, which Trump says is coming this week, as well as future changes to how the BLS and other government agencies do their work.
These past moves by Trump allies have often been to try and showcase less prominent statistics in an effort to make things look a little rosier and — proponents say — offer a more accurate view of the economy from the Republican perspective. But crucially, they add, it is not a direct challenge to the underlying raw data.
Data rigging? President Donald Trump speaks with reporters at Lehigh Valley International Airport on Sunday. (AP Photo/Julia Demaree Nikhinson) ·ASSOCIATED PRESS
Trump has clearly muddied all that.
Over multiple days of statements, he repeatedly said that the reason he fired McEntarfer was that the numbers she oversaw were “a scam.” It also hasn’t cheered markets and others that he has been vague on the changes he wants to see going forward.
This also comes after years of Trump dismissing economic data when it doesn’t suit him. Way back in 2017, then-press secretary Sean Spicer even once responded to good jobs figures by saying they “may have been phony in the past, but it’s very real now.”
But it has mostly been rhetoric in the past. And this recent move to actually fire the workers behind it has clearly worried economic observers that US government data is now on the road to being compromised.
Asked on Yahoo Finance Monday if investors have reason to now be wary of government data, TPW Advisory founder Jay Pelosky answered: “100%.”
“This is just another example of the dismantling of American exceptionalism,” he added, saying a premium placed on US markets could now be at jeopardy “because folks feel they can trust the information that comes out of the US government.”
Both the employment and gross domestic product (GDP) numbers have long been in GOP sights.
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On the jobs front: Trump’s team has been focused on Bureau of Labor Statistics data looking at the employment status of native-born populations ahead of the overall number that also included foreign-born workers.
The statistics for “foreign-born” workers include many naturalized Americans as well as those in the country legally.
Vice President JD Vance even touted that aspect of last week’s release on Friday afternoon, just hours before Trump declared the entire data set fake.
“I was told 6 months ago that Americans losing jobs and the foreign-born gaining jobs was an irreversible demographic fact,” Vance wrote early Friday afternoon. “Turns out you just needed a new president and a new immigration policy.”
Trump’s top economic adviser, Kevin Hassett, added over the weekend on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that the president’s firing of McEntarfer was more akin to a need for a “fresh set of eyes” at the agency.
A similar effort has been mounted in recent months around the data that measures America’s economic output.
Gross domestic product comes from the Bureau of Economic Analysis, and that wing of the government is overseen by Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, who has made the case that a more accurate measure of GDP would exclude government spending.
In March, he told Fox News, “It goes like this … if the government buys a tank, that’s GDP. But paying 1,000 people to think about buying a tank is not GDP. That’s wasted money.”
It is, once again, an effort perhaps not to change the raw data but offer a different way of slicing it.
This is underlined by how the government already publishes a figure roughly along the lines of what Lutnick has at times suggested: a total of only private output called Value Added by Private Industries (VAPI).
The focus on VAPI was most noticeable this spring when cuts from Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) were still being promised, and it was a move criticized at the time as simply an effort to sidestep economic pain there.
In the months since — with Musk’s departure and DOGE promises much less ambitious — the talk of revising GDP counting has faded as well.
Of course, some efforts by Trump’s team also fall into the category of seeming to cherry-pick data to make their stewardship of the economy look better — and that of their political opponents seem worse.
That long Washington tradition was seen last week when, on Wednesday, new GDP numbers offered a strong annual headline growth rate of 3% but with underlying economic growth much lower and closer to 1.2%.
Trump and his team naturally focused on the higher figure.
Then on Thursday, new inflation numbers saw investors focus on an inflation uptick and core prices, with the Federal Reserve’s preferred inflation gauge rising 2.8% on an annual basis.
Trump and his team instead focused on a lower figure offered by the overall Personal Consumption Expenditures price index only for the second quarter, which rose just 2.1% on an annualized rate.
Hassett on Sunday called that “the most important” number.
By Friday, perhaps the dour jobs report was too much to be spun with the revisions to prior months’ numbers revealing significantly fewer jobs and leading some, like economist Mark Zandi of Moody’s Analytics, to say that the release showed an economy “on the precipice of recession.”
Trump then simply declared the data fake and has followed that up with days of charges that the report “was RIGGED” against him.
Ben Werschkul is a Washington correspondent for Yahoo Finance.
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