WASHINGTON – President Donald Trump had a special guest in the Oval Office on Thursday: the right-wing economist Stephen Moore, who came bearing charts purportedly depicting bogus job numbers during Joe Biden’s presidency.
It was the latest White House effort to justify Trump’s firing of the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics over a bad jobs report last Friday. But it very quickly unraveled.
“I was telling the president that he did the right thing in calling for a new head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics because this shows that over the last two years of the Biden administration, the BLS overestimated job creation by 1.5 million jobs,” Moore said.
Moore’s chart showed angry red bars representing downward revisions to job numbers under Biden. In the lower-left corner, it indicated the source: the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
In other words, Moore was using BLS numbers as an argument against the BLS, which doesn’t make a lot of sense, especially considering it was a downward revision to numbers from May and June that led Trump to fire BLS commissioner Erika McEntarfer for her supposed political manipulation and incompetence.
How could downward revisions released during Biden’s presidency have been part of a plot to hurt Trump? And if this year’s revisions are suspect, why should we trust revisions from prior years, the most substantial of which were produced under McEntarfer’s leadership?
“The White House is trying to bend reality to fit President Trump’s preferences for economic data. Any economic data that is positive is true and the same report is fake when it produces results he doesn’t like,” Jessica Reidl, an economist with the conservative Manhattan Institute, told HuffPost. “There’s no rhyme or reason.”
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The White House did not respond to a request for comment on Moore’s use of one set of BLS numbers to discredit another.
Trump’s outburst over a bad jobs report is the second-term equivalent of his furious insistence in 2017 that more than a million people attended his inauguration: It’s lying about numbers in an obvious way, but with a much more authoritarian outcome.
Economists in academia and the private sector of all political persuasions have praised McEntarfer and the work of the BLS in general. They’ve patiently explained that the monthly jobs numbers are assembled by hundreds of professionals, from a survey of more than 100,000 businesses, and that the initial estimates are always revised in subsequent months as more survey responses come in. Cooking the books would require an elaborate conspiracy among career economists who’ve done their jobs the same way under Republican and Democratic presidents for decades.
“The process of obtaining the numbers is decentralized by design to avoid opportunities for interference. The BLS uses the same proven, transparent, reliable process to produce estimates every month. Every month, BLS revises the prior two months’ employment estimates to reflect slower-arriving, more-accurate information,” a group of statisticians — including two former BLS commissioners, one of which was a Trump appointee in his first term — said in a joint statement.
“This rationale for firing Dr. McEntarfer is without merit and undermines the credibility of federal economic statistics that are a cornerstone of intelligent economic decision-making by businesses, families, and policymakers,” the group said.
National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett has been the face of the White House’s after-the-fact strategy to trash McEntarfer’s work. Pressed for evidence of manipulation on NBC’s “Meet the Press” Sunday, he said there has been a pattern of increasingly large revisions, possibly due to fewer businesses responding to surveys since the coronavirus pandemic.
Expressed as a percentage of the change in overall employment level, however, the revisions have gotten smaller over the years, not larger, according to an analysis by the head of the Yale Budget Lab. It’s good to remember that the monthly jobs numbers derive from surveys designed to estimate changes in thousands to an overall number of more than 150 million. Even the largest revisions reflect an adjustment of less than 1%.
NBC’s Kristen Welker pressed Hassett on whether there was evidence the most recent revisions were somehow wrong.
“If you look at the number itself, it is the evidence,” Hassett said. (Really!)
Asked for evidence about the alleged pattern of statistical malfeasance in another interview this week on Fox News, Hassett pointed to a “surprisingly positive” gross domestic product report right before the 2012 presidential election, when he was working as an advisor to the Mitt Romney campaign.
“I had previously briefed Mitt Romney’s campaign that I thought they were probably going to have a number that looked like a recession, and then in fact they got a really big beautiful number right before the election,” Hassett said.
Funny thing: GDP numbers are produced by the Bureau of Economic Analysis, an agency in the Commerce Department, not the BLS, an agency in the Labor Department. So Hassett is not helping his case against the BLS by complaining about an entirely different agency. And, as a former associate director of the BEA noted in response to Hassett’s claim, the advance estimate for third-quarter GDP in October 2012 came in at 2%, which only modestly beat expectations. The number was later revised up to 3.1%.
Reidl, the Manhattan Institute economist, also served as an economic advisor to the 2012 Romney campaign. Without commenting on Hassett specifically, she lamented the discourse.
“It has been disappointing to see policy experts that I’ve known for a long time and respected say things that they have to know are misrepresentations,” Reidl said.
Given the decentralized data collection that goes into the monthly employment situation reports, it’s not clear how installing a lackey on top of BLS could immediately affect the data. But there are other levers Trump can pull if he’s not happy with his economic feedback. He has mused about firing Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell, for instance, over his refusal to slash interest rates, and a stooge at the central bank could wield immense power over the global economy.
“I find it scary how routine it has become when the White House does this many unwise things every week. Each one of them gets forgotten about by the end of the week. But I fear that each one of these is a prelude to something bigger and worse,” Reidl said.
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