{"id":137903,"date":"2025-05-18T14:14:55","date_gmt":"2025-05-18T14:14:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/cooking-the-books-fears-trump-could-target-statisticians-if-data-disappoints-the-guardian\/"},"modified":"2025-05-18T14:14:55","modified_gmt":"2025-05-18T14:14:55","slug":"cooking-the-books-fears-trump-could-target-statisticians-if-data-disappoints-the-guardian","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/cooking-the-books-fears-trump-could-target-statisticians-if-data-disappoints-the-guardian\/","title":{"rendered":"Cooking the books? Fears Trump could target statisticians if data disappoints – The Guardian"},"content":{"rendered":"

Proposed rule change could pave way for president to fire economists whose figures prove politically inconvenient
Summarizing his befuddlement with numbers, Mark Twain observed that there were \u201clies, damned lies and statistics\u201d.
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\u2019s 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 \u2013 both of which show a wary skepticism of Donald Trump\u2019s affinity for trade wars \u2013 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 \u201cintentionally subverting presidential directives\u201d 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\u2019s 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\u2019 warnings that tariffs could trigger a recession, the administration could use new employment rules to pressure workers into \u201ccooking the books\u201d.
\u201cThere 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,\u201d said Erica Groshen, a specialist in government statistics at Cornell University.
While acknowledging that there is as yet \u201cno evidence\u201d the Trump administration<\/a> 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\u2019s office of personnel management threatens the future integrity of federal agencies\u2019 figures.
The change<\/a>, based on an executive order<\/a> signed by Trump on 20 January immediately after his inauguration, would reclassify about 50,000 as-yet-unspecified permanent civil servant positions to \u201cpolicy\/career\u201d category, thus enabling their removal for \u201cpoor performance or misconduct\u201d.
The precise roles to be so redefined have yet to be revealed but Groshen fears statistic specialists will be in the administration\u2019s crosshairs.
\u201cBureau of Labor Statistics\u2019 leaders could be fired for releasing or planning to release jobs or inflation statistics unfavorable to the president\u2019s policy agenda,\u201d she wrote in a briefing paper<\/a> that urges organizations dependent on BLS figures to submit comments criticizing the proposal.
\u201cBy making it easier to remove employees if a president determines that they are interfering with his or her policies, it increases the potential for passivity or political loyalty to be prioritized over expertise and experience.\u201d
Trump regularly cast doubt on the accuracy of economic data<\/a> when in opposition \u2013 calling positive BLS jobs figures during the Obama and Biden administrations \u201cfake\u201d but hailing them as accurate when they painted a rosy picture of the economy during his first presidency.
Last month, when GDP figures showed an economic contraction during the first 100 days \u2013 partly fueled by tariffs \u2013 Trump put the blame on Biden<\/a>.
\u201cWe had numbers that, despite what we were handed, we turned them around and we were getting them really turned around,\u201d he told reporters.
The commerce secretary, Howard Lutnick \u2013 who has direct responsibility over many of the statistical agencies \u2013 has suggested changing the way GDP is calculated in a way that might provide more upbeat figures but which would mark a departure from established practice and international standards.
D<\/span>iluting data agencies\u2019 impartiality risks adding the US to the category of countries which have had the veracity of their economic statistics openly doubted, critics say. Groshen cited Argentina, whose official inflation figures were rejected as false<\/a> by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and Greece, where government statisticians were said<\/a> to have miraculously made inflation and disqualifyingly high budget deficits \u201cdisappear\u201d to enable it to join the European Union\u2019s single currency, the euro, in the late 1990s.
The sleight of hand had dire consequences. The 2008 global financial crash propelled the country\u2019s economy into a tail-spin, forcing it to seek huge loans from the IMF and the EU, which were only given on condition of harsh austerity measures and cuts to public services.
Popular anger over the conditions in Greece destabilised establishment political parties and led to a rise in support for radical and populist alternatives, including the leftwing Syriza, which won power in 2015. Frequent elections and changes of government since have raised concerns about the health of the country\u2019s democracy.
The IMF also censured Argentina and threatened it with expulsion in 2013 after officials were found to have been grossly understating the inflation rate for the previous six years.
Argentina \u2013 historically one of the IMF\u2019s biggest borrowers \u2013 did not receive another loan from the organisation until 2018. That loan, followed by another in 2022, failed to stabilise the country\u2019s economy and in 2023, Javier Milei, a far-right candidate and professed admirer of Trump, was elected president pledging drastic spending cuts to address its chronic economic problems.
Last month saw the fund agree to another $20bn bailout for Milei\u2019s government.
D<\/span>espite these baleful precedents, the Trump administration\u2019s sensitivity to economic figures indicating a tariff-driven slowdown creates a potential spur to follow a similar path, argued Erasmus Kersting, an economics professor at Villanova University.
\u201cI would say that there\u2019s definitely an incentive to cook the books, but I don\u2019t think that it is going to be very easy or feasible to do,\u201d he said, citing the US\u2019s long tradition of producing accurate economic figures.
\u201cThe Bureau of Economic Analysis would essentially need to be silenced or defunded and replaced with some other statistical agency, which would then result in different figures. The same would be true of the Bureau of Labor statistics.\u201d
Accurate and unbiased figures are crucial in helping the Federal Reserve form sound policy, Kersting said. In their absence, Trump might have more scope to attack the Fed\u2019s chair, Jerome Powell, who he has already accused of \u201cplaying politics\u201d by not bowing to his demand to cut interest rates.
Kitty Richards, a former treasury and White House official under the Biden and Obama administrations, said data collection had been impaired by Elon Musk\u2019s attacks on federal agencies under the auspices of the unofficial \u201cdepartment of government efficiency,\u201d or Doge.
\u201cWe should view attacks on government data collection as hand in glove with attacks on journalism,\u201d said Richards, now a senior fellow at Groundwork Collaborative, a thinktank. \u201cUndermining data collection and casting doubt on data that is released is part of a program of undermining the public\u2019s ability to learn the truth.\u201d
Even a temporary interruption of the US\u2019s established data-collecting capacity would be a \u201creal tragedy\u201d and lead to a permanent loss of knowledge, she said. \u201cYou can\u2019t go back and fix it. If you have a data series stretching back 50 years, then it gets cut for two or three years, you no longer have that 50-year data series. You\u2019ve lost knowledge forever.\u201d
Greshen, who is calling on users of government statistics to object to the proposed civil service changes before a 30-day window expires on 23 May, said the fate of US democracy could hinge on the continued production of accurate figures.
\u201cIn a democracy, you want to be feeding people the right information so they will make the right choices. But if the goal is to destroy democracy, you\u2019d want to control the statistics to fit your story \u2026 you want to be promoting your own version of reality.\u201d<\/p>\n

source<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Proposed rule change could pave way for president to fire economists whose figures prove politically inconvenientSummarizing his befuddlement with numbers, Mark Twain observed that there were \u201clies, damned lies and statistics\u201d.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\u2019s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":137904,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-137903","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-us","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/137903","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=137903"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/137903\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/137904"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=137903"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=137903"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=137903"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}