Donald Trump will need to take more radical action than simply firing the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) if he is determined to “cook the books” on jobs figures, the federal agency’s former commissioner has said.
Erica Groshen, who ran the BLS during Barack Obama’s presidency, said meddling with how government statisticians calculate unemployment and labour market trends would require “a whole new cadre” of people to be brought in by a new commissioner. It would also provoke upheaval and a likely rash of whistle-blowing among the existing workforce.
Trump provoked widespread criticism last week by firing the BLS’s commissioner, Erika McEntarfer, after weaker-than-expected jobs numbers for July and downward revisions for the two previous months, statistics that seemed to portend a looming economic slowdown.
Without providing evidence, Trump accused McEntarfer, who was confirmed by the Senate last year, of producing “fake” numbers for “political purposes”. He also falsely stated that she had “produced beautiful numbers” on jobs for Kamala Harris before last year’s presidential election.
In fact, the BLS jobs report four days before last November’s poll showed the economy had added just 12,000 jobs in the previous month, something Trump at the time branded a “catastrophe”.
In an interview, Groshen said Trump’s reasoning for terminating McEntarfer had “no basis at all”. She said the decision was “very shocking” despite having warned of such a possibility earlier this year in a briefing paper that flagged up changes in civil service employment classifications under Trump, which make it easer to fire senior officials deemed out of step with the president’s agenda.
“This isn’t inconsistent with the way he’s acted in other situations,” she said. “[But] it’s a question of boundaries. I had quietly hoped and assumed it wouldn’t happen.
“I think it’s disastrous for the statistical system and for the BLS.”
The episode has provoked equally apocalyptic warnings from seasoned commentators. The New York Times columnist, Thomas Friedman, called it “the most dangerous” thing Trump had said or done and expressed fears that “the America you know will be gone” by the end of the president’s term.
Janet Yellen, the former treasury secretary, called it “the kind of thing you would only expect to see in a banana republic”.
Writing on Substack, Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a historian of authoritarian political systems, invoked, among other examples, fascist Italy where, she wrote, Mussolini “pioneered the politicization of economic research” for the “glorification” of his dictatorship.
The stakes for projecting economic competence were higher, she wrote, for leaders “in today’s age of electoral autocracies” – a term used to describe ostensible democracies with entrenched authoritarian leaders and which Trump’s detractors believe is his ideal model for the US.
Yet Groshen – who condemned McEntarfer’s sacking in her role as co-chair of Friends of BLS, a group of former agency veterans – said the White House would have an uphill task if its goal was to skew official data-gathering in the manner of contemporary autocracies, or Greece and Argentina, where government statistical agencies were exposed for falsifying data, with profound economic and political consequences.
“The only gratifying thing about this has been the very strong response from all sorts of communities, raising alarm about it now that it has happened,” she said.
In the short-term, nothing at the BLS is likely to change, she said: “Bill Wiatrowski is a BLS lifer. I appointed him as acting deputy commissioner. He’s a steady hand and the operations of the BLS will continue as before.”
The acid test, Groshen said, will come when Trump nominates McEntarfer’s permanent successor. But even a like-minded appointee committed to the president’s Maga agenda will not be able, on their own, to transform the agency into a malleable puppet body.
“It would not be easy to start injecting a partisan slant, [or] start manipulating the data,” Groshen said.
“This is a very automated process that is designed to be impervious to manipulation. The whole structure of how data are analyzed, and the process from the analysis of the data to the release [of figures] would have to be redesigned.
“They would need to bring in with them a cadre of other like minded people, and then they would have to start changing the process. The career civil servants, I have no doubt, would resist that and make strong arguments against it.
“If nevertheless they persisted, you would have resignations, whistle-blowing. You would see disruptions of the sort that BLS doesn’t normally have. You would have changes in methodology that were not announced beforehand and without any documentation and the kind of transparency that statistical agencies are required to have. There probably would be delays in publication, because it’s very hard to reprogram these systems overnight.
“This isn’t just [a case of only ] one or two people would notice. This would pervade the system.”
Those ostensibly daunting obstacles raise the possibility of Trump backing away from a maximalist effort to bend the BLS to his will.
“I would have said that some of the other changes in our government couldn’t happen, yet they have. So am I worried about it? Yes,” said Groshen, now affiliated with Cornell University as a specialist in government statistics. “Nevertheless, the outcry that we’ve seen so far about the firing of the BLS commissioner gives me hope that even this administration won’t go that far.”
The best-case scenario, she says, would be for the administration to step back from the brink, appoint someone “whose reputation is stellar”, and maintain the agency on its current autonomous and impartial lines, with extra funding.
Greater financial support could even help address whatever legitimacy criticism Trump and his supporters might have.
“The little bit of truth in those accusations is that the statistics are not perfect and not as good as they could be,” said Groshen. “What is not true is that they’re manipulated and the implication that the headline numbers, the national numbers, are much less reliable than before.”
The biggest problem the agency faces is falling response rates from employers and other bodies – meaning estimate figures often have to be drastically revised at a later stage, the quirk that upset Trump and partially prompted McEntarfer’s sacking.
Hope that Trump might choose a pragmatic course was fueled by criticism of McEntarfer’s axing from three Republican senators: Rand Paul of Kentucky, Thom Tillis of North Carolina and Cynthia Lummis of Wyoming.
Yet the possibility that he may adopt a bludgeon response to unwelcome economic numbers remains high.
There have been reports of altered or removed data at the Department of Health and Human Services under Robert F Kennedy Jr’s stewardship. The commerce secretary, Howard Lutnick, has previously talked of changing how gross domestic product (GDP) is measured, leading to fears of interference at another statistical agency, the Bureau of Economic Analysis.
And on Thursday, Trump announced that he had ordered the commerce department to conduct a new census that would exclude undocumented people, a sharp break with historic US practice of counting all residents.
If that is the shape of things to come for the BLS – a sub-division of the Department of Labor, which has been producing labor and job market statistics since 1884 - the worst forebodings of Trump’s critics will be realized, Groshen said.
“If data from the BLS and the other statistical units across the federal government becomes less reliable, we won’t be in as bad shape as we were in, say, 1900,” she said. “But we’re going to have a cloudier windshield as we fly our national plane or drive our national car – so we will make more mistakes, at policy level, business level and family level.”
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