The Perils of “Shooting the Messenger”

When political leaders meddle in government data, it rarely ends well, The New York Times’ Chief Economics Correspondent wrote in an Aug. 3 article. So President Trump’s decision to fire the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics shortly after it released weak July job-creation numbers that he disputed “was a move with few precedents in the century-long history of economic statistics in the United States,” Ben Casselman reports. “And for good reason.”

Casselman then went on to cite how in recent decades the governments in Greece, China and Argentina faked a variety of economic statistics, all with disastrous results.

“It is too soon to know whether the United States is on a similar path,” Casselman noted. “But economists and other experts said that Mr. Trump’s decision to fire Erika McEntarfer was a troubling step in that direction.”

He then quoted Janet L. Yellen, former Treasury secretary and chair of the Federal Reserve, as describing the sacking as “the kind of thing you would only expect to see in a banana republic.”

Still, experts on government statistics told Casselman that data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and other agencies is unlikely to deteriorate dramatically overnight. “The career employees who collect and analyze the data remain in place, using the same methods and procedures they used before Dr. McEntarfer was pushed out,” he noted.