U.S. President Donald Trump shake hands with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Helsinki, on July 16, 2018. Credit - Brendan Smialowski—Getty Images President DonaldTrump's firing of the Commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS)on Friday afternoon just after she delivered a negative jobs report echoes the impulse of many leaders to shoot the messenger.Trump declared, "I've had issues with the numbers for a long time. We're doing so well. I believe the numbers were phony like they were before the election and there were other times. So I fired her, and I did the right thing." WhileTrump may or may not be friends with Vladimir Putin, he is clearly following the Russian President's HR staffing guidelines to eliminate lieutenants who bring bad news. Aswe've documented before, the Federal State Statistics Service (Rosstat) has a longhistory of manipulating official economic statisticsto please Putin, "bending over backward to correct bad numbers and burying unflattering statistics" under the pressure the Kremlin has exerted to corrupt statistical integrity, especially since Putin's invasion of Ukraine in 2022. The reliability of official statistics from China has also beenbrought into question, leading analysts to rely on a wide range of unofficial or proxy indicators to gauge the true state of the Chinese economy. Even China's former Premier, the late Li Keqiang,reportedly confidedthat he didn't trust official GDP numbers. Read More:What to Know About the Jobs Report That Led Trump to Fire the Labor Statistics Chief Like other strongmen, Trump has repeatedly shown a pattern of manipulating data to suit his preferred narrative. Trump's surprise firing of BLS Commissioner Erika McEntarfer has quickly caught the attention of technical market analysts and economists on both sides of the political spectrum. One side cheers the push to disrupt a slow, bureaucratic federal agency. The other side shouts in dismay over concerns about yet another example of Trump politicizing an apolitical institution. Both responses are warranted. The accuracy of BLS data has long been questioned as major revisions only come in months later. To their credit, the BLS, in addition to other statistical agencies, has publiclyrecognizeda need to modernize its methodology. Unfortunately, though, the severity of job revisions has worsened since the COVID-19 era, with no successful program to address the issue. The downward revision on Friday of more than 250,000 jobs marked the most significant adjustment since the depths of the pandemic. However, Trump'saccusationsagainst the BLS of rigging the job numbers to make him and the Republican base look bad, and his subsequent firing of McEntarfer based on a belief that BLS revisions were politically motivated, are yet another step closer to authoritarianism. Introducing his latest conspiracy theory, the President went even further by suggesting McEntarfer, whose career spans two decades across Republican and Democratic Administrations, rigged the numbers "around the 2024 presidential election" in then-Vice PresidentKamala Harris' favor. Trump conveniently fails to mention that his definition of "around" was backin August 2024. Recall, the 2024 presidential election was a full three months later in November. Revisions are not unusual behavior by the BLS. They are a critical part of the natural process for developing an accurate picture of the largest, most dynamic economy in the world. Theaverage size of job revisionssince 2003 is not insignificant at 51,000 jobs. And, despite what Trump may want Americans to believe, his tariff policies have created an unprecedented level of uncertainty in the U.S. economy, comparable only to that of 2020, with many economists expecting a recession to follow as a result.Bloomberg reportinghas pointed to a possible connection between the severity of negative job revisions and recessionary economic environments. The BLS has also been subjected to DOGE-ledhiring constraints and other resource rescissions. In addition, the Trump Administration's disbanding of the Federal Statistics Advisory Committee in March both eliminated one of the main engines for enhancing agency performance and, perhaps, in what should have been a concerning harbinger, abolished the canary in the data integrity coal mine. Complaints about BLS methods are legitimate, like the reliance on enumerators over scanner data, and deserve attention, but this is not how to fix it. Read More:What Trump's Win Means for the Economy This is far from the first time Trump has subordinated statistical integrity to political theater. Fromcrowd sizesto weather forecasts,vote countstotariff formulas, Trump has discarded facts for fictions that play to his political favor. Trump doesn't just bend the truth—he twists the numbers until they resemble propaganda and then silences those who disagree. As CBS News titan Edward R. Murrow warned 65 years ago: "To be persuasive, we must be believable. To be believable, we must be credible. To be credible, we must be truthful." Contact usatletters@time.com.
