Trump’s firing of BLS official casts shadow on federal data gathering
Presidents and lawmakers love and hate official numbers. When federal statistics show things are good, they point to the numbers with conviction. When the data’s not so rosy, they ignore it. And every once in a while, they cry foul.
It happened on Friday, when the Bureau of Labor Statistics revised sharply downward its previous job gains estimates, President Donald Trump called the numbers “rigged.” Then, he took what historians call the unprecedented step of firing Erika McEntarfer, the commissioner of the BLS, accusing her of faking the jobs numbers – without providing any evidence of data manipulation.
The president’s moves illustrate the rising clout of data in government decision-making and the reliance that consumers, investors and companies place on those numbers to make decisions…
“The Trump administration … has made no secret about its desire to get rid of people who are trained in their jobs if they are not loyal to the current president,” says Stuart Shapiro, dean of the public policy school at Rutgers University and author of “Trump and the Bureaucrats: The Fate of Neutral Competence.”
“Schedule F will likely be put in place soon,” he adds. “And we will see another very dramatic example of that trend when that happens.”