In that interval of a few hours between the release of the Friday jobs report and President Trump’s decision to fire of the Commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, I had a few people ask me whether I thought it was possible that the books for May and June had initially been “cooked,” since they ended up being revised dramatically downward. That question seemed a bit quaint after the subsequent firing of Erika McEntarfer. But the answer I gave is relevant in a few ways to the situation going forward.
What I said was that in the Trump era we can’t really rule anything out. (More than cooking, I noted just a few days ago that DOGE-cuts have forced BLS to rely more on estimates relative to data collection in its inflation calculations.) But we should go in with a strong assumption that that is not the case — that there isn’t any cooking — for a number of important reasons.
For me, trust figures very little into this judgment. The first of those reasons is that it would simply be very hard to do. BLS is staffed by career government economists and statisticians, very apolitical people in their work, who are just not the kind of people who are going to go along with anything like that. To the extent they were ordered to do so or Trump found a compliant statistician willing to cook for him, that fact would almost certainly leak out in short order, either through leaks to the press or people resigning.
