The war on data is about more than jobs

Trump is targeting non-partisan sources of knowledge in general

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First, just a note to say that I’m going on vacation for a week so although there will still be the same number of posts as usual this month, the spacing might be different.

Last week Donald Trump fired Erica McEntarfer, the non-partisan head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), because he didn’t like the fact that the latest unemployment report showed that his policies seem to be negatively affecting employment.

This puts the United States in the same league as nations like China, Zimbabwe, and Turkey - countries where the production of economic data is politicized to try to make the ruling regime look good.

Even if Trump had nominated a totally bog-standard economist to replace McEntarfer, the BLS’s credibility would still have taken a severe hit. For as long as Trump is in office, nobody can be sure whether the agency’s leader is cooking the numbers - even subtly - for fear of their job.

But he didn’t even nominate a bog-standard economist. Instead, he nominated E.J. Antoni, the chief “economist” at the Heritage Foundation, an extremist right-wing think tank. Antoni is known for absurd criticisms of BLS which are so nakedly partisan as to be laughable.

Even though the U.S. economy was widely seen as the envy of the world during the Biden years, Antoni argued that it actually had not recovered from the depths of pandemic recession at all. Then as soon as Trump took office - even before Trump’s policies had a chance to have an impact - he started saying the U.S. economy was suddenly performing fantastically and all was well.

The fact BLS didn’t back up his narrative with its monthly jobs report was, to Antoni, not a sign that he was living in a partisan bubble, but a sign that BLS is corrupt and out to get Donald Trump. So he made a lot of hay out of criticizing the agency, and because MAGA has become a fact-free zone, a lot of people listened to him. Those people, it turns out, included Trump.

Antoni will now have to face a Senate confirmation hearing, and I think it will be one of the most interesting of Trump’s term so far. Not just because this is a test of exactly how craven Republican senators can be. We’ve had plenty of those already, and the answer is “very”. What makes it interesting is that it is hard to overestimate the extent to which Big Capital does not want Antoni to get that job, and I’m wondering whether or not they can stop him.

The U.S. government’s economic statistics are widely regarded as excellent, and the private sector simply does not replicate them.¹ They are very helpful to a whole host of businesses and markets who rely on them to understand economic conditions and make decisions accordingly. Destroying or corrupting the statistics just to make the toddler in the White House feel better about himself is senseless vandalism.

But it’s also worse than that. It suggests a complete detachment from reality on the part of the White House - that the White House does not care to listen to negative feedback about the economic harm that its policies are doing. And a White House that thinks that way is likely to make a lot more poor decisions and do a lot more economic harm.

So business lobby groups will be pushing hard for Trump to not do this, and to find some way to come to peace with the continued existence of BLS in its current form. Business lobby groups used to count for a lot in the Republican Party, and to hold a lot of sway with Republican senators. I’m interested in seeing if that is still remotely true.

I’m also interested in what this means for the future of the MAGA coalition. Large sections of corporate America made a lousy bet on Trump, thinking that with him they would get less regulation, lower taxes, and fatter profits. They chose to ignore what was obvious - that the Republican Party has become a personality cult which is completely hostile to fact and reason, and that ultimately that was going to affect into their economic policy as well.

It’s the classic story of riding a tiger on a rampage and assuming that it won’t turn around to eat you too.

But there’s also a broader story here, which is the Trump regime’s destruction of non-partisan sources of data and knowledge in general. The White House has also deleted or withdrawn from public view much of the federal government’s data on climate change, purely because it wants to pretend that the problem doesn’t exist. It is also undermining attempts to generate new data which is essential to tracking climate change into the future.

It’s a sad fact that some of the premier data-producing agencies in the world are now in the hands of someone so fickle and weak that they would destroy them just to make themselves feel better about their own failed policies. And sadly, fixing the damage done to them will take years even when and if MAGA leaves power.

1. That said, there is an ongoing issue with some BLS numbers due to declining survey response rates. Basically, fewer businesses are returning the agency’s surveys about hiring and firing, so it has to rely more on statistical modelling to arrive at its numbers (the same problem is affecting the polling industry). This sometimes leads to large revisions to the data later on, which is what set Trump off in this case. In a mature administration, this issue could be discussed and worked on, but that is clearly not what Trump has an interest in doing.