President Donald Trump is ramping up his attacks on the vast network of government data collection, leaving some statisticians and demographers worried the president is undermining the short- and long-term credibility of federal data.
Trump’s announcement of a mid-decade census on Thursday came less than a week after he fired Bureau of Labor Statistics commissioner Erika McEntarfer following the release of a jobs report that painted an unfavorable picture of the economy.
Those decisions to commandeer two of the most prominent data collection agencies in the federal government represent the Trump administration’s broader reshaping of statistics agencies, his critics argue — including eliminating surveys, cutting staff and delaying the release of reports that portray the Trump administration’s policies in a negative light.
Paul Schroeder, executive director of the Council of Professional Associations on Federal Statistics — a membership organization that includes research and data organizations that rely on federal data — said employees at the U.S. Census Bureau, the Bureau of Labor Statistics and other federal statistics agencies are feeling the effects of Trump’s attempts to politicize their work.
“I think the stat agencies are under incredible pressure to get timely, accurate and granular data to the American public, and that's a tall order these days,” Schroeder said. “The folks that work with these agencies are largely apolitical. They care about the data.”
The president’s call for a new census — which he said would be based on “information gained from the Presidential Election of 2024” and comes amid a nationwide fight over redistricting — will likely present an uphill battle for census staff should it actually come to fruition. The staff will likely be asked to dramatically accelerate the planning and execution of their nationwide survey.
The census is a constitutionally mandated count of every person in the United States that occurs every 10 years and typically takes years to organize and execute. The president has seemingly referenced a new apportionment — the once-a-decade process that determines how many House seats each state gets — which he has no clear legal authority to do.
The last census was conducted in 2020, during Trump’s tenure in office, but was dramatically affected by the pandemic. Results were ultimately released in early 2021 and the Census Bureau has subsequently said some populations were over- or undercounted.
The added strain of a new census comes after the Department of Government Efficiency cut five Census Bureau surveys, saving $16.5 million. DOGE did not specify which surveys it cut when it made the announcement in June.
Mary Jo H. Mitchell, co-director of the Census Project, a coalition group made up of local, state and national advocates for quality census data, said ordering a new census will subvert the planning for the 2030 census, which has been underway for years.
“What this is, is an attempt to potentially derail the schedule that the bureau has laid out over the course of this decade to prepare for the 2030 census,” Mitchell said.
White House spokesperson Taylor Rogers said the president “believes businesses, households, and policymakers deserve accurate data when making major policy decisions and he will restore America’s trust in this key data.”
Trump allies have been raising questions about the census before Trump’s announcement on Thursday. Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene introduced a bill last month to order a new census that would exclude non-citizens and redraw congressional maps based on that count. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis said last month the 2020 census was “flawed” and encouraged Trump to order a new census.
On Thursday, Trump also called in reporters to the Oval Office for unscheduled remarks to highlight economic data compiled by Stephen Moore, a conservative economist. The data, which included unconfirmed Census Bureau figures not released to the public, presented a rosier view of the economy than August’s jobs report and expanded on the White House’s argument that BLS data is untrustworthy.
The president again suggested preliminary jobs estimates by BLS were skewed for political purposes.
“You may well be right,” Moore replied. “But even if it wasn’t purposefully, it’s incompetence.”
Trump’s firing of McEntarfer after this month’s underwhelming jobs report creates further uncertainty at BLS, where job cuts and a lack of resources have placed an added burden on its data collection operation. On Monday, Trump nominated Heritage Foundation economist E.J. Antoni as the next BLS commissioner. Antoni had recently suggested BLS may publish its jobs report quarterly instead of monthly while echoing the White House’s claims about the accuracy of monthly jobs data.
Amid the uncertainty, the Trump administration is signaling it could significantly overhaul the BLS. The Trump administration proposed an 8 percent cut to the agency and a recommendation to move BLS from the Labor Department to the Commerce Department, combining it with the Census Bureau and the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis.
Aaron Sojourner, senior economist at the Upjohn Institute for Employment Research, a decades-old Michigan-based research organization, said Trump accusing McEntarfer of rigging labor data for political reasons shows a misunderstanding of what motivates BLS staff.
“It's just a mistake to imagine that it's anything other than technical experts doing their best with the resources they have to tackle this really hard challenge,” Sojourner said.
The dual shocks to BLS and the census was not the first time the Trump administration has waded into government stat-making.
In June, the Trump administration delayed and redacted a farm trade report that predicted an increased trade deficit in farm goods, POLITICO previously reported — a politically inconvenient finding as Trump increases tariffs on foreign farm goods.
In March, the administration eliminated several voluntary expert adviser panels to federal surveys, including at the Census Bureau and BLS. And last month, the administration fired the U.S. chief statistician — a historically apolitical role that develops standards for federal statistics agencies — and replaced her with a conservative appointee.
The sweeping pressure campaign on the statistics agencies has long been forecasted by both Trump and his political allies. Trump has a history of questioning the integrity of government reports and manipulating data going back to before he entered politics. He accused jobs reports of being “rigged” before last year’s election, and during his first term, he sought to prevent immigrants from being counted in the 2020 census.
Project 2025, the conservative policy blueprint published by Trump allies ahead of last year’s election, calls for stronger “political leadership” at statistics agencies like the Census Bureau, and recommends those agencies be consolidated together under the Commerce Department.
Arturo Vargas — the head of the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials Education Fund who led the 2030 Census advisory council before it was disbanded earlier this year — said the increased attacks and heightened rhetoric against statistics agencies may cause experienced officials to leave the government.
“Already there's been a diminished capacity at the Census Bureau to carry out its work, and this just may accelerate it and contribute to just tearing down our federal statistical infrastructure for the sake of politics and partisan gain,” Vargas said.
By dragging the federal data into political debates, statisticians and economists worry that Trump may permanently erode trust in critically important data used by the government to apportion resources, write legislation and distribute funds — and by the private sector to track a slate of key market factors.
“These data, if they're compromised, really undermine not just big decisions that policy makers have to make at the local, state and federal level, but everyday decisions people have to make about how they want to manage their lives,” the Census Project’s Mitchell said. “And once we've done that, it's going to be really hard, I think, for people to trust the data again.”
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