A key element of the White House’s war on data is hiding government statistics it doesn’t like. In fact, throughout Donald Trump’s second term, his administration has gone to outlandish lengths to keep important data away from the public.
As The Washington Post reported a few months ago, “The Trump administration is deleting taxpayer-funded data — information that Americans use to make sense of the world. In its absence, the president can paint the world as he pleases.” The same report added, “Curating reality is an old political game, but Trump’s sweeping statistical purges are part of a broader attempt to reinvent ‘truth.’”
It’s difficult to do a full accounting of what has gone missing, but we know the list includes climate data, education data, trade data and crime data — all of which has been buried, deliberately, because the figures were deemed politically inconvenient.
That list might yet grow in dramatic ways. The Washington Post reported:
President Donald Trump’s nominee to run the Bureau of Labor Statistics told Fox News Digital on Monday that the agency should suspend monthly jobs reports, a change that could leave businesses and policymakers at least temporarily without the data they’ve used for decades to gauge the state of the labor market and broader economy.
For several decades, the public, here and around the world, could count on the release of new U.S. jobs data on the first Friday of every month. Donald Trump’s handpicked choice to lead the Bureau of Labor Statistics, E.J. Antoni, apparently disapproves of this schedule.
“Until it is corrected, the BLS should suspend issuing the monthly job reports but keep publishing the more accurate, though less timely, quarterly data,” Antoni said, referring to recent revisions to monthly reports. “Major decision-makers from Wall Street to D.C. rely on these numbers, and a lack of confidence in the data has far-reaching consequences.”
(Antoni’s interview with Fox News Digital was apparently taped on Monday but published Tuesday, after Trump announced that he was nominating the Heritage Foundation economist to lead the BLS.)
The argument is badly flawed, in part because releasing the data quarterly, instead of monthly, leaves everyone in the dark for much of the year, and in part because of the underlying motivation: If the goal is to address “a lack of confidence in the data,” the president wouldn’t have fired a highly qualified and widely respected BLS chief in the first place, only to replace her with an unqualified partisan loyalist.
Indeed, perhaps people would have greater confidence in the data if Trump stopped lying about the figures.
Nevertheless, after Antoni’s comments to Fox News Digital circulated, a reporter asked White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt whether the administration would, in fact, start limiting public access to U.S. job data to once per quarter, instead of once per month.
“Well, look, what I’ll tell you about the Bureau of Labor Statistics — I believe that is the plan and that’s the hope, and that these monthly reports will be data that the American people can trust,” Leavitt said. “As you know, the Bureau of Labor Statistics has made massive revisions after the last several reports that they have put out.
“And there has certainly been a decline in the quality and reliability of data coming from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and there’s been an increase in revisions,” Leavitt added.
First, when a White House press secretary begins her answer to a straightforward question with, “Well, look,” that tends to be a bad sign.
Second, saying that the administration “plans” and “hopes” to keep releasing monthly reports was hardly a firm commitment to the status quo.
Third, the White House continues to talk about revisions to government statistics in a way that makes it seem as if Trump administration officials don’t understand the underlying policy details at a basic level.
Fourth, if there’s been “a decline in the quality and reliability of data,” that might have something to do with the president firing so many of the people who were responsible for collecting and compiling the data.
And finally, all of this served as a reminder of a threat that hasn’t been widely appreciated. In recent weeks, many have voiced concerns about the president and his team possibly manipulating official data, but now there’s a new concern: What if they limit access to the data for months on end?
There’s no need to cook the books when it’s easier to close the books and keep them hidden.
This article was originally published on MSNBC.com
