Even before last week, there were growing concerns about the Trump administration and the impact it was having on the integrity and reliability of federal economic data — but not for the expected reason. The concerns had less to do with corruption and partisan mischief and more to do with budget cuts.
The White House’s layoffs, buyouts and hiring freezes undermined federal economic statistics collection, leading to a Reuters report two weeks ago noting that many economic experts were increasingly worried about the quality of official U.S. economic data.
Late last week, however, the problem became spectacularly worse.
On Friday, Donald Trump was confronted with inconvenient truths about the failure of his economic agenda: After inheriting a great economy from Joe Biden, the Republican president’s policies had helped create the worst U.S. job market in 16 years (not including the totals from the pandemic in 2020). At that point, Trump had some choices, ranging from asking Americans to be patient to changing course on his failing plans.
He instead chose to fire Dr. Erika McEntarfer, the head of the Labor Department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics, who’d shown the audacity to release accurate information that the White House didn’t want to see. In the hours and days that followed, Trump targeted the career civil servant, who’d earned bipartisan respect, accusing her of participating in a conspiracy that only existed in the president’s imagination.
The Republican proceeded to characterize his own administration’s jobs data as “rigged,” “ridiculous,” “phony” and a “scam,” reality be damned.
To the extent that Trump tried to defend his obvious abuse, he presented evidence — I’m using the word “evidence” loosely — that was either demonstrably untrue, gibberish, self-defeating nonsense, or some combination thereof. Kevin Hassett, the director of the White House National Economic Council, did his best to carry the president’s water, but he too was reduced to absurdities, claiming that economic data will be more “reliable” and “trustworthy” just as soon as Trump replaces highly qualified career civil servants with people he likes who’ll confirm his baseless assumptions.
I can appreciate why the typical person might not find all of this especially shocking, since most people have probably never heard of McEntarfer or the Bureau of Labor Statistics. But it’s worth appreciating the many reasons this matters.
Other countries have gone down this path, and it never ends well. Argentina and Greece, for example, played fast and loose with economic data for years, and it led to serious economic crises. In the former Soviet Union, Joseph Stalin similarly punished statisticians who failed to produce the data he expected to see.
This undermines democracy itself. Trump already appeared to have authoritarian-style ambitions, and Friday’s developments made matters vastly worse. University of Connecticut professor Patrick Lynch told The New York Times, “Democracy can’t realistically exist without a reliable epistemic infrastructure. Anti-democratic, authoritarian leaders know this. That is why they will seize every opportunity to control sources of information. As Bacon taught us, knowledge is power. But preventing or controlling access to knowledge is also power.”
We’ll now be flying blind. It’s difficult to count the number of people, here and around the world, who rely on the Bureau of Labor Statistics for objective and apolitical data. That trust has been established over generations — and Trump just set it on fire.
Going forward, everyone from policymakers to economists, Federal Reserve officials to investors, business owners to regular ol’ American workers, will now have reason to wonder about the integrity of data from the United States government.
Indeed, the White House in recent days has begun insisting, in no uncertain terms, that the world shouldn’t trust data from the United States government. Hassett said as much on Friday afternoon, as did the president himself.
Democratic Sen. Brian Schatz of Hawaii called McEntarfer’s dismissal “the stuff of fascist dictatorships.” It’s a development that will resonate in dangerous ways for the foreseeable future.
This article was originally published on MSNBC.com
