The moment Donald Trump began his second term, researchers and independent citizens suited up for the war on data. They scrambled to preserve diversity, public health, and climate change-related government reports and webpages. They tracked the impacts of Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) funding cuts and federal job loss in real time. They put out calls about the importance of independent statisticians publishing some of the most relied-upon data in the world. Nearly eight months after inauguration, the abstract picture of how the Trump White House laid the groundwork to overhaul federal data collection is becoming clear.
Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick told a group of federal statisticians that the independence of their work was “nonsense,” during a town hall for Census Bureau and Bureau of Economic Analysis employees on Tuesday.
The comments were first reported by Government Executive, which obtained a recording of Lutnick’s address to the group.
“As best as humanly possible with as many tools as possible, get the right answer,” Lutnick reportedly said. “So independence is nonsense. Okay, accuracy is the only word that matters.”
Lutnick’s language could become the framework for a new precedent for federal data collection: a definition of “accuracy” that is wholly dependent on what makes Trump look good.
The shift follows the now-familiar Trump administration pattern of making sweeping changes to the operations of executive branch agencies in response to Trump’s various grievances. White House officials this week told the Wall Street Journal the administration is mulling ways to change jobs data collection after the president complained that negative federal economic data is designed to hurt him personally and politically. He doubled down on this belief when he fired Bureau of Labor Statistics commissioner Erika McEntarfer just hours after a July jobs report revision lowered the number of jobs added to the economy in May and June. When jobs report numbers have shown positive economic growth, Trump hasn’t questioned the validity of those figures and in fact has taken credit for job creation and other reported upturns.
After McEntarfer’s firing, Stephen Miran, Trump’s top economic advisor, told Axios the BLS needed to “get those revision numbers down” and that the data needed “fresh eyes.” He then floated the idea of delaying the monthly report by as much as two weeks to give the companies included in the government’s survey more time to participate.
Several economists and policy experts have told TPM over the past two weeks that large revisions aren’t without precedent and often come when — and signal that — there is a major shift in the economy. The poor jobs numbers responded to uncertainty caused by Trump’s sweeping tariff policies. Small and mid-sized businesses are especially vulnerable to economic downturns and may submit their survey responses late, leading to larger revisions.
Trump’s replacement for McEntarfer is E.J. Antoni, a hyper-partisan Heritage Foundation economist who helped author Project 2025. He has consistently parrotted points made by Trump, disparaged the BLS, and criticized its jobs report, which experts told TPM is an international gold standard in economic data. In another striking development, NBC revealed on Wednesday that Antoni was in the crowd at the Jan. 6 insurrection. (A White House spokesperson told NBC Antoni was “in town for meetings, and it is wrong and defamatory to suggest EJ engaged in anything inappropriate or illegal.”)
Antoni also took Stephen Miran’s suggestion to delay the report lightyears further, when, in an Aug. 4 interview which was published on Tuesday, he suggested halting the publication of the legally-mandated monthly jobs report altogether.
On Wednesday U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent walked back Antoni’s suggestion in an interview with Bloomberg Surveillance. Bessent said he would not support ending the jobs report “at all.”
“What somebody says when they’re a private citizen is very different,” Bessent said of Antoni.
He would know. As a private citizen and favored pick for Trump’s Treasury Secretary, Bessent downplayed Trump’s propensity for widespread, burdensome tariffs and was seen by Wall Street as a regulating force to Trump’s more economically destructive whims. He told the Financial Times in October 2024 that Trump’s tariff threats were a negotiation tactic. “My general view is that at the end of the day, he’s a free trader,” Bessent said at the time. Since then, he’s been unable to stop Trump’s tariffs, which have been levied against more than 90 countries.
And in this uncharted economic landscape, the Trump administration is pushing for the U.S. to produce less economic data.
In June, officials held and then redacted a government report that predicted an increase in the nation’s farm goods trade deficit, according to a June report from Politico.
“The politically inconvenient data prompted administration officials to block publication of the written analysis normally attached to the report because they disliked what it said about the deficit,” Politico reported.
The BLS also announced it decreased data collection for its Consumer Price Index, which measures inflation, by 19%. While the agency did not point to a specific reason for the cutbacks, the New York Times reported that the agency “makes reductions when current resources can no longer support the collection effort.” Funding for the BLS has declined by about 18% since 2009 when adjusted for inflation, according to a 2024 report by the American Statistical Association. Despite declining resources, Trump is proposing cutting the agency’s budget by $56 million in 2026.
William Beach, Trump’s former BLS commissioner, said he doesn’t think a new commissioner would be able to manipulate data to make it more politically favorable because of the transparent process at the agency.
“There are safeguards built in that are just so impenetrable that you can’t do it,” Beach told TPM.
For now, experts have said the BLS is staffed with professional civil servants and independent, apolitical statisticians who will continue to do their jobs. But even that could change.
Trump has taken several steps to politicize the federal workforce by changing civil servant positions into political appointee positions. In July, Trump signed an executive order creating a new “policy-making or policy-advocating” classification of federal employees.
“The end game here,” Rob Shriver, managing director of Democracy Forward’s Civil Service Strong initiative, told the Federal News Network, “is to get as many folks as possible out of the job who take an oath to the Constitution — and bring as many folks as possible into the job who are loyal to the President.”
