Since January, President Donald Trump’s administration has disbanded economic data advisory groups, proposed budget cuts to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and, most recently, fired its commissioner and alleged the data in the latest jobs report was “rigged.”
Economic experts with federal government experience are sounding an alarm. These steps, compounded, amount at best to bad optics of the economic data’s trustworthiness, they say. At worst, they might influence the data’s accuracy down the line.
“Trust is essential to the work of the agency; otherwise, you might as well not have it,” Erica Groshen, a former BLS commissioner, told NOTUS. “You will mislead people if the data are tainted. If the data aren’t tainted, but nobody believes in it, then people still won’t use it. And so trust is mission critical.”
While Trump suggested he removed now-former Commissioner Erika McEntarfer for incompetence, the president has also issued numerous complaints about what the jobs data itself indicated. In a post on Truth Social, Trump called the data “RIGGED in order to make the Republicans, and ME, look bad.”
Trump also presented data to reporters on Thursday from an economist at the conservative Heritage Foundation. Trump said that these “all-new numbers” indicate the economy under his administration is better than the economy under former President Joe Biden.
In Trump’s quest for a new BLS commissioner, economists said the president’s desire for loyalty above accurate data could place the next person in the role in a tough spot — especially in light of Trump’s new tariffs, which will show their results in upcoming data releases.
“The next commissioner, I think it’s going to be tough for whoever steps in,” Marshall Reinsdorf, who spent over a decade at BLS conducting research on the Consumer Price Index, told NOTUS. “There’s a lot of sophisticated customers from their data. They want credibility with them, and then they somehow want to stay out of trouble with the president, and it seems like those two are almost in conflict. So it’s going to be a tough job.”
In a statement, the White House said that “President Trump believes that businesses, households, and policymakers deserve accurate data to inform their decision-making, and he will restore America’s trust in the BLS.”
A Department of Labor official also said in a statement the DOL “has learned about challenges at BLS through the media rather than from the Commissioner directly.”
“The BLS Commissioner was seemingly allowing problems to emerge that would outrage the research community and result in negative headlines, rather than proactively working with the Administration to find solutions to preserve the quality and integrity of the data,” the statement read.
Maintaining the gold-standard credibility that federally generated economic statistics have enjoyed for so long will be difficult if the Trump administration’s actions are antithetical to better, improved data, economists told NOTUS.
Both Groshen and Reinsdorf volunteered their time on outside economic advisory groups that consulted with several government agencies on federal data. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick unceremoniously disbanded the boards earlier this year.
A message on the Federal Economic Statistics Advisory Committee and Bureau of Economic Analysis Advisory Committee webpages says the “purposes” for which they were “established have been fulfilled, and the committee has been terminated.”
The termination of the groups “betrayed a total misunderstanding of the role of advisory committees and statistical committees,” Groshen said. Part of the mission of statistical agencies, she argued, is continual improvement as the economy changes and technology advances, and advisory committees are a key part of how that happens.
“This is free advice given by the nation’s top experts to the agencies, so the quality of the data isn’t affected overnight, but the ability of the agencies to move forward in improving data is affected,” Groshen said.
Another former member of the Federal Economic Statistics Advisory Committee, Constance Hunter, serves as chief economist of the Economist Intelligence Unit. She said all the members of these committees were highly respected and invested in contributing to data they felt was a public good. The elimination of these advisory committees, alongside the BLS firing, troubles her.
“When you have those two things together, you start to get a pattern that would make one worry about the trajectory, the commitment to the public good, the commitment to openness and transparency, the commitment to excellence. It all begins to get questioned,” Hunter said.
Another concern among economic data analysts is Trump’s proposed $56 million budget cut for BLS. Budget issues have been longstanding at the department, and BLS is showing signs of strain: Already this year, the department has reduced sampling for the Consumer Price Index and discontinued calculation and publication of around 350 indexes for the Producer Price Index. These are both tools used to gauge inflation.
Reinsdorf said that this amounts to a larger percent of the BLS samples being “inferred prices” — on critical inflation gauges at a time when Trump’s tariffs are expected to cause price hikes — and budget cuts would only exacerbate the issue.
“As you make the sample size smaller, it becomes a less reliable statistic. And you also have to wonder about all those things you’re not collecting. If they’re systematically different from the ones you are, you could potentially have a significant error in the inflation rate number,” he said. “So just the whole thing, trying to put it together with less data and more assumptions, just makes it less reliable and accurate.”
Another issue — decreased survey responses in the jobs report — could be helped with additional staffing doing more follow-ups, Reinsdorf suggested. (Updates such as the one Trump criticized are often because of additional survey results coming between jobs reports.) The personnel to conduct those follow-ups, naturally, costs money as well.
None of the economists were opposed, in principle, to some methodology or analysis alterations. They even argued that more funding is required to improve BLS.
“If they talk about the need for improvements, they should make the funds available to make those improvements, actually,” Reinsdorf said.
But they stressed that estimates are key to their work, and those are prone to imperfections.
“There is no such thing as a perfect statistic,” Groshen said. “All estimates have limitations, and part of the central responsibility of a statistician or a statistical agency is to be very aware of limitations of any statistic and to be looking for ways to improve it all the time.”
That’s part of why she served on the advisory committee, to understand what BLS was doing right and where the agency might be able to improve. But Groshen felt that was fundamentally different from the arguments for change the administration is making.
“What has been alleged is that the imperfections are due to manipulation, and that is not true,” she said.
The discomfort around the administration’s actions also spans partisan lines.
Trump’s pick for BLS during his first term, William Beach, and the Barack Obama-appointed Groshen, issued a statement as part of Friends of BLS — a group focused on the agency’s “overall fiscal well-being” — denouncing McEntarfer’s firing. The statement said the firing was “without merit and undermines the credibility of federal economic statistics.”
“I’m sure Bill and I have voted differently in many elections, but we are in complete agreement on the need for objectivity at the BLS,” Groshen said. “I think he was an excellent commissioner. I hope he says the same with me. And we think Erika McEntarfer was doing a fine job under very challenging circumstances.”
Trust, Groshen said, “depends on optics.”
“The optics are not great, right?” Hunter said. She said it would have been one thing to suggest a reevaluation of data methods, propose a new one, and appoint a new commissioner who the administration felt was equipped to do it.
But “the action of doing it the very day that the data came out does not have the best optics,” Hunter added.
Hunter argued there’s already evidence that the global markets aren’t buying it.
“Is it a coincidence that after this action, we had three Treasury auctions this week, and all of them struggled?” Hunter said. “It is not without consequences, right, if you keep going down this continuum. There will be a feedback loop, and that feedback loop will be through the capital markets.”
She added, “We don’t need to rely on my opinion, right? We will keep having Treasury auctions.”
And the timing could not be worse for statistics to struggle: Economists across the board are confident Trump’s new, high tariffs will make their presence known with higher domestic prices, and the world is watching.
But it’s not hopeless. Hunter said the initial market outcry on Treasuries was a sign that if the market perceives data to be flawed or suspicious — or even that it may possibly be so in the future — the market will move accordingly, regardless of what Trump wants.
Experts will also be more than aware if something looks fishy in future data. The economists said they also broadly believed that statisticians at BLS are devoted to accuracy and nonpartisanship, and they would fight any effort to interfere with accurate data.
Then, there’s also the matter of Trump not always remaining fond of all of his own picks. For example, Trump is publicly feuding with Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, who Trump appointed during his first term as president.
Groshen, however, wants to see some action from lawmakers.
She’s hoping Congress will actively investigate McEntarfer’s firing “so that we just bring that all out in the open,” explicitly clarify the limited set of conditions under which a term appointee can be terminated, provide additional funding to the agency and explicitly exempt the federal statistics system from the Trump administration’s efforts regarding what’s now known as Schedule Policy/Career, formerly “Schedule F.”
(Schedule Policy/Career would allow agency leaders to reassign some career federal workers in policy-influencing roles into a new category of employee that makes them easier to hire and fire. It has been criticized as a force to “politicize the federal workforce.”)
All three economists affirmed these statistics as a “public good”: for businesses, for students wanting to pick a college major with employment opportunities, for academics wanting to examine the state of the country.
“We made a commitment as a country and decided that these public goods had had a high return on investment. This is both true and long-standing,” Hunter said. “That’s why we have such exceptional government statistical agencies.”
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This story has been updated with a comment from the White House.