OPINION:
Democrats and the mainstream media had a meltdown Friday after President Trump fired Labor Statistics Commissioner Erika McEntarfer. This followed a jobs report her agency released that radically revised down previously reported employment gains in May and June. It was the biggest revision outside COVID-19 in 50 years.
“It’s classic Donald Trump. When he gets the news he doesn’t like, he shoots the messenger,” said Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer. Mr. Trump vented on Truth Social that the jobs report was intentionally rigged against him. He expressed “no confidence” in Ms. McEntarfer, who serves at the pleasure of the president, or official numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
The downward revision was so unprecedented, “I’ve been looking at [these numbers] for 40 years and thought that it must be a typo,” National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett said Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” He emphasized the need to understand how the agency whiffed so big.
“The president wants his own people there so that when we see the numbers, they’re more transparent and more reliable, and if there are big changes and big revisions … then we want to know why. We want people to explain it to us,” Mr. Hassett added.
“It’s 2025, and the data should be able to be — [Bureau of Labor Statistics analysts] use surveys and things like that, which, frankly, just aren’t as effective anymore,” Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan explained Sunday to CBS’s Margaret Brennan on “Face the Nation.” “You know, we don’t use surveys. … We watch what consumers really do. We watch what businesses really do.
“How do we get the data to be more resilient and more predictable and more understandable? Because what bounces around is restatements, and that was one of the largest restatements, going back five or seven years in the pandemic, five years in the pandemic, that creates doubt around it,” he added.
The solution?
“Let’s spend some money. Let’s bring the information together. Let’s find where else in the government money is reported. We report millions and millions of data points to the government every day. The data is out there somewhere,” Mr. Moynihan said.
With all the information the government collects on small businesses and the advent of artificial intelligence, it seems inexcusable that the bureau produces market-moving numbers that must be revised monthly. Often, the revisions are larger than the initially reported number.
Wall Street traders and the Federal Reserve closely follow the statistics, so the bureau’s missteps erode faith and sow distrust in the government, no matter which party serves in the presidency.
No smoking gun proves political bias; however, the pattern of the revisions does raise suspicions.
Two years ago, under President Biden, this paper questioned the federal government’s manipulation of the books to make his economy look better than it was.
Mr. Biden touted rising wages in his 2023 State of the Union address, presumably based on Bureau of Labor Statistics data showing a 4.9% rise in wages in the fourth quarter of 2022. In June 2023, however, the bureau revised that increase to an actual decrease of 0.7%. Adjusting for inflation, wages actually declined 4.7%. Yet that entire spring, Mr. Biden was campaigning on soaring household incomes.
Last August, the Bureau of Labor Statistics released data showing it had overestimated job growth for the year ending March 2024 by 1.2 million jobs, about a third of all supposed job growth that Mr. Biden was touting on the campaign trail. The revised numbers were announced after Mr. Biden dropped out of the presidential contest. The revision also fueled the Fed to cut interest rates in September, its first cut in nearly three years, providing short-term economic relief to millions of Americans, thus boosting Kamala Harris’ campaign.
Throughout Mr. Biden’s tenure, the bureau was plagued with errors and mismanagement that always seemed to benefit the president. Monthly job numbers always generated glowing headlines, only to be quietly revised downward the next month.
Republican congressional leaders fumed at reports that a Bureau of Labor Statistics economist shared nonpublic information with several Wall Street firms, accidentally loaded data files to its website 30 minutes before the consumer price index’s scheduled release time and delayed others. In October, the bureau ignored a congressional committee’s request for information on how all these gaffes occurred. Lawmakers were looking to provide transparency and accountability to the American public.
At times, accountability in Washington seems like an oxymoron. I, for one, am glad Mr. Trump is delivering on it.
• Kelly Sadler is the commentary editor at The Washington Times.