The ancient Greek play “Antigone” by Sophocles warns that “no one loves the messenger who brings bad news” and “no man delights in the bearer of bad news.”
In the 20th century, George Orwell delivered another version in his prescient masterwork 1984: “Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book has been rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street and building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And that process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.”
In short, is this Trump’s “Queen of Hearts” moment, or something more?
It’s difficult to look beyond Trump’s longstanding admiration of Russian President Vladimir Putin. As we’ve documented in the past, Putin has a history of rewriting inconvenient narratives. Rosstat, the nation’s official statistics agency, has a longstanding record of manipulating economic data to please Putin. It goes to great lengths to amend poor figures and hide unflattering statistics under pressure from the Kremlin, especially since Putin’s Ukraine invasion in 2022. The Russian agency has been “switching to new methodologies” and “recalculating data” with alarming frequency. Then there’s the overt political interference—Putin has fired the heads of Rosstat, transferred control of the agency to political appointees, and appointed a blatant political pick as deputy economic minister.
But this is America, it’s supposed to be different. Trump’s abrupt firing of McEntarfer surprised market analysts and economists of all political backgrounds.
Trump has a (small) point when he claims that BLS performance has been slipping. Concerns about the timeliness and accuracy of BLS data are longstanding, with major revisions occurring only months later. The BLS and other statistical agencies have acknowledged the need to modernize their methodology, but progress has been slow. After COVID-19 disruptions, the extent of job revisions has swung more widely than in the past, notwithstanding attempts to improve their methodologies. The recent downward revision on Friday, subtracting over 250,000 jobs, is the largest since the peak of the pandemic.
However, Trump’s accusations that the BLS faked job numbers to weaken his credibility and that of his Republican supporters highlight his tendency to distort facts. His apparently impulsive decision to fire McEntarfer, on a baseless belief that BLS revisions were politically motivated, recalls so many literary depictions of authoritarianism.
Revisions are a standard part of the BLS process, essential for improving the accuracy of the U.S. economy’s picture as new data arrives. Since 2003, the average revision has been around 51,000 jobs, not an insignificant figure in its own right. Despite claims that may suggest otherwise, Trump’s tariff policies have introduced an unprecedented level of uncertainty into the U.S. economy—comparable only to 2020—with many economists anticipating a recession as a consequence. Bloomberg has convincingly suggested a possible link between the magnitude of negative job revisions and recessionary conditions.
Just as leading businesses worldwide have worked to navigate the uncertainties caused by the president’s economic policies, should we expect different outcomes from a government agency that has also faced hiring restrictions and resource cuts due to arbitrary DOGE-led initiatives? Additionally, the Trump administration’s decision to disband the Federal Statistics Advisory Committee in March removed a vital mechanism for improving agency performance, including the modernization of data collection, tabulation, and analysis. While concerns about BLS methods, such as the dependence on enumerators instead of scanner data, are valid and merit attention, this is not the proper way to address them.
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