President Trump treats facts in the same way that he treats people: He expects them to line up in support of his goals, and if they don’t, he seeks to get rid of them.
Last week Mr. Trump was confronted by the inconvenient truth that job growth has been in a three-month slump. A more grounded president might have considered whether the data raised questions about his agenda. Mr. Trump characteristically insisted that the questions were about the data. He charged that the beige functionaries of the Bureau of Labor Statistics were engaged in a conspiracy to discredit his administration, and he fired the head of the bureau. The firing is so clearly damaging to the credibility of the federal government that it drew objections from some Senate Republicans.
Mr. Trump’s allegations against Erika McEntarfer, the longtime public servant whom he summarily fired, have no foundation in reality. The government’s monthly report on the labor market is produced by the bureau’s nonpartisan staff. Estimates for different parts of the economy are compiled separately and then pulled together into a national report, which is completed before it reaches the desk of whichever political appointee happens to be running the bureau. Experts, including past leaders of the agency nominated by presidents from both parties, said that it was effectively impossible for the bureau’s leader to manipulate those numbers.
One kernel of comfort is that Dr. McEntarfer’s departure won’t necessarily prevent the agency from continuing to produce reliable data. At the very least, we may hope that if the administration seeks to influence future jobs reports, some of the people responsible for producing the data will have the courage to speak out and tell the public.
But there is no doubt that Mr. Trump’s actions will cast a shadow over the rest of the government that he leads. Public servants must now do their work while fearing that they may be fired merely for producing information that displeases the president. Mr. Trump is also making it harder for the government to obtain information, as people and businesses asked to respond to questions now have reason to doubt whether the answers will be accurately reported.
The president says that he fired Dr. McEntarfer because he wanted to preserve the integrity of federal data. The reality is that Mr. Trump’s actions will create the very problem he claims to be fixing. Instead of improving the quality of information gathered and reported by the government, he is sowing doubts about the ability of federal agencies to produce reliable data. And in doing so, he is leaving Americans ever more reliant on whatever he declares to be the truth.
The production and dissemination of reliable information is an important government service. The decisions Americans make, from whether to wear a raincoat to which medicines to take and which investments to make, are often shaped by federal data.
Less appreciated, perhaps, is that data also is necessary for the government to function. 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.
Countries that fudge statistics are basically lying to themselves, and they suffer the consequences, as Ben Casselman documented in a recent analysis in The Times. Greece understated its fiscal deficits for years, even prosecuting an official who insisted on reporting the actual figures — lies that contributed to a crippling debt crisis beginning in 2009. Argentina became so well known for undercounting inflation that investors were left to assume the worst, driving up the country’s borrowing costs. Authoritarian regimes have long published rosy data that conceals and deepens the immiseration of their populations.
The Trump administration, blind to this history, is engaged in an increasingly wide-ranging effort to erase data or to prevent the collection of new data that contradicts its political agenda. It has proposed to defund the Hawaiian observatory that has measured the rise of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere since 1958. It shut down a national database created to track misconduct by federal police officers. It removed from the website of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention the results of the Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System, a long-running study of adolescent behaviors — including sleep, sexual activity and substance abuse — and then, after a court blocked the decision, reposted the data with a note insisting that much of it wasn’t accurate.
One of Mr. Trump’s most powerful political techniques is to seize on problems as the justification for his destructive policies. There is a long history of politicians grumbling about the inaccuracy of the monthly government jobs report because it is usually inaccurate. It’s a first estimate, a rough cut, a best guess that is typically published on the first Friday of the following month. The agency updates that initial estimate as it obtains more and more accurate information; since 1979, when the agency started quantifying its mistakes, the first guess has been off by an average of 57,000 jobs. That’s a lot.
Kevin Hassett, the director of the president’s National Economic Council, sought to justify the president’s actions on the Sunday talk shows by arguing that the bureau’s mistakes show “partisan patterns.” But Mr. Hassett, like his boss, offered no substantive evidence for this calumny. The beauty of data is that everyone can examine the same set of information, and there is no pattern of political bias in the agency’s revisions. Indeed, Ernie Tedeschi of the Budget Lab at Yale calculates that the only clear pattern is that the initial estimates have become more accurate over time.
The bureau does face challenges. It relies on a monthly survey of approximately 60,000 households at a time when people are harder to reach and less willing to participate in surveys of any kind. The agency needs to work harder to gather the same amount of data, but Congress has repeatedly refused its requests for additional funding. As a result, the bureau has been forced to rely increasingly on other sources of information to impute what is happening in the job market.
Dr. McEntarfer said last year that the agency, without more funding, might need to remove 5,000 households from its survey, which would further reduce the quality of its estimates.
A president concerned about the quality of the jobs data ought to be focused on addressing those problems. Mr. Trump, however, isn’t proposing to provide more funding or to improve the agency’s methods. He is not interested in how many jobs the American economy will produce this month. In firing Dr. McEntarfer, Mr. Trump made clear that he doesn’t want to know the answer.
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