Cooking the books? Fears Trump could target statisticians if data disappoints [View all]
Source: The Guardian
Sun 18 May 2025 09.00 EDT
Summarizing his befuddlement with numbers, Mark Twain observed that there were “lies, damned lies and statistics”. The acerbic phrase later become so deeply embedded in popular consciousness that it once formed the title to an episode of The West Wing, NBC’s portrayal of a fictitious US president played by Martin Sheen. Now professional economists and number-crunchers fear the aphorism could become a White House theme in real life. Buffeted by global markets and public opinion – both of which show a wary skepticism of Donald Trump’s affinity for trade wars – the president may be about to turn his renowned hostility to truths at odds with what he believes towards public servants charged with producing accurate information.
A proposed rule change making it easier to fire civil servants deemed to be “intentionally subverting presidential directives” could pave the way for the White House to fire statisticians employed to produce objective data on the economy but whose figures prove politically inconvenient, experts warn. Statistics released by agencies such as the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) and the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) are used by the Federal Reserve Bank to set inflation policy and interest rates. They also form the basis on which businesses and investors take decisions.
The US’s global reputation as a stable economic power and a reliable partner goes hand-in-hand with its long history of producing accurate data, dating back to the establishment of the BLS in 1884. Interfere with the latter and you risk sacrificing the former, experts warn. But with Trump under pressure to explain shrinking gross domestic product (GDP) figures amid economists’ warnings that tariffs could trigger a recession, the administration could use new employment rules to pressure workers into “cooking the books”.
“There are a number of changes to the civil service that make it much easier for the administration to try to interfere with the activities of the statistical agencies and that worries me,” said Erica Groshen, a specialist in government statistics at Cornell University. While acknowledging that there is as yet “no evidence” the Trump administration has done so, Groshen, a former commissioner at the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), fears a new rule proposed last month by the White House’s office of personnel management threatens the future integrity of federal agencies’ figures.
Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/may/18/trump-statisticians-economy-figures
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