President Donald Trump claims, without a shred of evidence, that the government’s premiere economic data operation nefariously engineered negative statistics “for political purposes.”
His top economic advisers don’t share that view, even as they continue to defend his stunning – and largely impulsive – decision to fire the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics after a poor jobs report last week.
Trump says “rigged.” His advisers say “reform.”
The rhetorical sleight of hand, difficult as it may be to catch as Trump’s economic team takes pains to defend a fixation untethered to reality, captures an important window into the internal West Wing discussions about the next nominee to serve as commissioner of the BLS.
Trump’s economic advisers are fully aware of the widely acknowledged necessity of insulating – or at least attempting to shield – the next BLS chief from the perception of political interference, according to people familiar with the internal debate.
“The efficacy and the believability of our economic projections are very important,” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said on MSNBC this week as he argued for a more efficient and accurate data collection process. “I think the replacement is going to be a highly competent statistician or labor economist and it will be someone, you know, who won’t have errors of this magnitude.”
One week after the BLS commissioner was ousted, Trump and his economic advisers have tried to clean up the damage by making the narrative about the need to modernize the agency to make the data more reliable and accurate. But that’s easier said than done, and the administration is working to find someone reputable who won’t freak out markets.
“It is imperative that Trump’s nominee be perceived by businesses and investors as nonpartisan and independent of the White House,” Michael R. Strain, the director of Economic Policy Studies at the American Enterprise Institute, wrote this week. “Because trust in the integrity of government data is a foundation of prosperity, it is in Trump’s direct political interest to appoint an independent BLS chief.”
Trump, at least publicly, isn’t exactly making that process any easier and his political allies have pressed the White House to appoint an unabashed loyalist, people familiar with the matter told CNN.
But Trump’s economic advisers understand the bureaucratic constraints any nominee would face if confirmed for the role by the US Senate.
The commissioner, after all, isn’t responsible for collecting the data. That exceedingly arduous and labor-intensive process is conducted by hundreds of federal employees who Republicans and Democrats familiar with the process alike say pursue their mandate with an apolitical and dedicated approach.
As the data comes into the agency, only about 40 career officials have access to the raw findings and are tasked with creating the final presentation for public release.
The commissioner doesn’t even see the data until it’s largely locked in and complete – less than 48 hours before it publishes, according to Bill Beach, the conservative Republican Trump appointed to run the agency in his first term.
“Zero is the upper bound of that response,” Beach said when asked by CNN how much influence a commissioner has over the final numbers. “There was no way for me to change the data. I could have said, oh, you people need to do a better job, the numbers are too low or too high and it would have made zero difference to that staff. In fact, they would have talked to me less.”
That doesn’t mean there has been a long-standing discussion about significant improvements that could be applied to the current process.
The business response rate to the initial survey that comprises the jobs numbers has dropped dramatically in recent years. Technological upgrades have been weighed for years and are widely acknowledged as a necessity for an agency that has faced budget cuts and significant senior staff departures in recent years.
“There’s always room for improvement,” Beach said. “We need to have a better way of collecting these numbers in a more cost-effective way. That’s what I hope the president does.”
To this point, that hasn’t happened. The administration has proposed an 8% cut to the agency’s budget for the next fiscal year and has proposed cutting 150 positions.
Lawmakers are set to dive into a fractious government funding debate when they return from their August recess and several senior Democratic aides say House and Senate appropriators plan to utilize Trump’s decision to elevate the agency’s work will turn it into an important part of the debate ahead.
“I wouldn’t say try to do better with the same money,” Cathy Utgoff, who served as the agency’s commissioner under President George W. Bush, told CNN. “I would say you really need to have more money here, because you have to collect more data to make it more reliable.”
For the moment, however, Trump’s advisers are continuing the tenuous balancing act of highlighting the significant revisions without imposing long-term damage on a strained data operation often referred to as the “gold standard” by economic policymakers around the world.
“What we need is a fresh set of eyes over the BLS,” National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett said August 3 on NBC’s Meet the Press.
Hassett, in subsequent interview on Fox News Sunday, said that if he ran the BLS and had “the biggest downward revision in 50 years, I would have a really, really detailed report explaining why it happened.”
Reform and transparency have been the throughline of the evolving defense provided by Trump’s allies – even if Trump has shown no interest in the more nuanced rationale for his unprecedented move.
The awkward dynamic was on full display in the Oval Office on Thursday, as Trump hastily summoned the White House press corps to display a simplistic chart displaying annual employment revisions under his predecessor.
The data was delivered to Trump by Stephen Moore, the conservative economist who has served as an outside adviser to Trump at various points during his first and second administration.
As Moore detailed the data making up the posterboard displayed for reporters, he was careful not to ascribe political motives – only to be interrupted by Trump after calling it a “gigantic error.”
“I don’t think it’s an error,” Trump said as he cut in. “I think they did it purposefully.”
Moore recalibrated on the fly – carefully and with visible discomfort.
“You may well be right, but even if it wasn’t purposefully, it’s incompetence,” the senior visiting fellow at the Heritage Foundation said in a hedged effort to avoid contradicting Trump’s assertion.
Trump has said he will announce his pick to lead the agency as soon as Friday. The nominee will face an intense confirmation process, which lawmakers told CNN will not be expeditious in the wake of Trump’s actions and rhetoric.
It’s a dynamic that only serves to underscore the view shared by economic officials outside of the administration – and within.
US economists polled by the Kent A Clark Center for Global Markets at the University of Chicago this week said there was no evidence to suggest the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ jobs figures were politically engineered. Several economists surveyed raised significant concerns about the long-term damage Trump’s attacks would do to the long-standing perception of reliable US economic data.
That’s a direct threat to Trump’s own aspirations of a new “Golden Age” for the US economy.
“It is in Trump’s direct political interest to avoid this,” Strain said. “But given his history of scoring own goals, I am worried,”
