Stephen Moore, President Donald Trump’s former economic advisor, told Fortune that firing McEntarfer when he did was akin to “firing the referee because you don’t like the way the game turned out.”
“I’m not here to defend Trump,” Moore, who was also Trump’s one-time nominee to serve as a Federal Reserve Governor, added. “But I do think he should have fired her a long time ago, because the numbers that have been coming out now for the last several years have just not been an accurate gauge as to what’s really going on in the economy.”
Moore, while disagreeing that the numbers were manipulated, concurred with Trump that the BLS needs a new “Mr. Fix It” to head the Bureau. He said that in his 40 years of working in economic research, he had never seen the jobs numbers become so unreliable.
Recent economic data is plagued by the same issue as political polling data: Nobody wants to pick up the phone anymore, Moore said. The monthly jobs report relies heavily on surveys of businesses and households, which worked when everyone used landline phones, but is less reliable in the digital age.
Agencies need the space and money to “restore” survey response rates, while also experimenting with new means of data collection, the economists argued.
“Transitioning to a system in which less survey data is blended with more administrative and private sector data, while preserving data integrity and privacy standards, is the generationally important task facing statistical agencies today,” the economists wrote.
“Typically, the monthly revisions have offsetting movements within industries—one goes up, one goes down,” Mersol said. “In June, most revisions were negative.”
In other words, the sharply negative revisions could’ve just been chance.
“I’m going to look into it, but first impression is that you can’t really make the numbers different or better by firing the people doing the counting,” he said.
GOP Sen. Lisa Murkowski from Alaska said that she doesn’t trust the numbers, but the move makes it worse.
“And when you fire people, then it makes people trust them even less,” she said.
