‘How many people do you employ this month?” might sound like the kind of question an employer can easily answer, but it’s not. Especially for large businesses, the exact number of employees in a given month is hard to pin down. The media report layoffs and hires in round numbers, but for calculating total employment in the country, it really matters whether “500” means 478 or 523, because those discrepancies multiplied across millions of businesses make a huge difference.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics sends a survey to employers each month to figure out how many people they employ, as part of the jobs report. In the good old days before Covid, that survey had a response rate of about 60 percent. From respondents’ guesses about how many people they employ, the BLS had to guess about how many people are employed in this nation of 340 million souls.
That’s a really hard job. The BLS employs some of the best statisticians in the world, and they happen to be pretty good at it, often getting within a tenth of a percent of the final workforce numbers.
Then, Covid happened, and the establishment survey response rate dropped like a rock. It hasn’t recovered and currently sits at 43 percent. What was already hard at a 60 percent response rate is now even harder.
The problem of falling response rates has been well known for years, even before Covid. “The quality of data from household surveys is in decline,” said a paper published in the fall 2015 issue of the Journal of Economic Perspectives, because “households have become increasingly less likely to answer surveys at all” and “those that respond are less likely to answer certain questions.”
Within government, Donald Trump’s appointee as BLS commissioner, William Beach, has been a leader in calling for modernizing the surveys that statistical agencies rely on. As commissioner from 2019 to 2023, Beach asked Congress for several million dollars in funding — peanuts, in federal budget terms — to redo the survey along the lines of other countries such as the U.K., which now uses an online-first methodology. It never came to be.
Beach organized a letter to Congress and the executive branch signed by numerous statistical experts in February of this year outlining the long-running problems statistical agencies have been facing. Budgets have not kept up with costs that are out of the agencies’ control, and staff who were doing vital work have been cut. Neither Congress nor the administration took action.
Beach has called Trump’s firing of his successor, Erika McEntarfer, “totally groundless,” and he’s correct. The issues with jobs reporting are not about politics or McEntarfer’s competence. In fact, they are exactly the kind of thing that an administration committed to technological modernization and government efficiency should find to be in its wheelhouse. And there’s no reason to think this particular jobs report was any more flawed than any other.
McEntarfer was not standing in the way of this modernization. Trump was mad about the jobs report, so he fired her.
He made this abundantly clear in a Truth Social post less than an hour after the one announcing McEntarfer’s firing, where he called the jobs numbers “rigged” against Republicans. So biased, apparently, that Vice President Vance was referring to them approvingly on social media mere hours beforehand.
There’s no consistent partisan bias at work here, as was demonstrated last year when the same BLS that Trump said was pro-Democrat for issuing downward revisions of earlier jobs reports under Biden issued the weakest jobs report of the year right before the presidential election. The job is hard when done well, and it’s been getting harder to do well.
Trump is now claiming the downward revisions of earlier jobs reports under Trump are a sign of political bias, even though that means it was initially making him look better. He says so because he wants the Federal Reserve to cut interest rates, and weakening job performance makes that more likely.
No one should have to take these tantrums seriously, but firing the BLS commissioner is serious. The integrity of United States statistics is important not just for the government, but for the private sector as well. And these reports are relied upon around the world, not just in the U.S. The goal should be to get them right, not make them more favorable to the president.
Trump is shooting the messenger of bad economic news, not unlike when China discontinues inconvenient data series that make the Communist Party look bad. The BLS will continue to do its work, but now under a justified cloud of speculation that it is manipulating data to avoid Trump’s wrath. And the economy itself is what it is, no matter how the statistics are reported.