Founded in 1884, the Bureau of Labor Statistics has faced many controversies over its history. In 1932, President Herbert Hoover forced its commissioner to retire rather than waive a newly created age limit for federal employees, a decision that critics attributed to the bureau’s unemployment estimates being higher than Hoover’s preferred figures. During World War II, labor unions bitterly attacked the bureau’s acting commissioner, accusing him of failing to adequately measure wartime inflation in order to preserve lower wage rates. And in the 1970s, Richard Nixon’s administration secretly investigated the bureau because Nixon was convinced a group of Jewish civil servants was manipulating federal statistics against him.
The U.S. Labor Department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics Commissioner Erika McEntarfer, who was recently fired. (U.S. Bureau of Labor)
But on Aug. 1, Erika McEntarfer became the first BLS commissioner to be fired.
Many have jumped to McEntarfer’s defense, and the Friends of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, a joint partnership of multiple professional organizations that use BLS data, accused President Donald Trump of politicizing the agency. The anger is understandable, but the charge is misaimed: The bureau can’t be politicized because it has always been political in a basic sense. The bureau was created by Congress; its budget is controlled by Congress; Congress can tell it what to measure; and the president can legally fire its commissioner. Like any government agency, the bureau is a thoroughly political entity. And yet the administration’s critics are right to be worried.
On social media, Trump claimed without evidence that McEntarfer had “faked the job numbers” prior to the election and that the recent payroll statistics had been “RIGGED.” Other staff members were more tempered but insisted the firing was based on the bureau’s faulty methodology. Secretary of Labor Lori Chavez-DeRemer cited a “string of major revisions” that “raised concerns.” Speaking to CBS News, Kevin Hassett, director of the National Economic Council, said that BLS payroll data had been subject to “massive revisions” and needed a “fresh set of eyes.”
Although payroll statistics are routinely revised as new data becomes available, the recent revisions were indeed large, and one might reasonably wonder why and if the process could be improved. But the White House’s actions don’t seem to match its stated justifications. If the Trump administration’s primary goal was to address concerns about BLS methods, it could have asked the agency for a public account. It could have started an independent review or explained why the payroll revisions were flawed and how they could be improved. It could have referred the matter to the academic experts on the bureau’s advisory committees —except that the administration dissolved those committees in March, declaring that they had “fulfilled their intended purpose.” Instead, on the day that disappointing payroll numbers were released, the president immediately fired the commissioner.
That disconnect between words and actions points to the deeper problem. It suggests to critics that the administration isn’t seeking “fair and accurate” numbers, as Trump declared on Truth Social, but ones that reinforce his conviction that the economy is “BOOMING.” Official statistics, in this view, aren’t an external check on the beliefs and claims of the politically powerful; they should merely reflect that power.
American legislators created federal statistics for specific political ends. Yes, they would be useful for administrative power. But they were also to inform citizens, to create a public set of facts owned by, and accountable to, the people themselves. The push to establish the BLS itself came primarily from 19th century labor unions and workers organizations, which felt that only the publication of accurate facts about the conditions of capital and labor would enable the country to grapple with the dramatic social and economic changes of industrialization. As one union leader put it, creating a national labor statistics bureau was “one of the primary objects of our organization.”
Creating such facts, of course, is hard work. There are disagreements about what to measure, how to measure it and how to interpret the results. The way we choose to handle those disagreements is a political choice. In one approach, disagreements about statistics should be part of public, reasoned arguments in which the assumptions, limits and aims of competing choices are interrogated, weighed and debated by those who have a commitment to the truth and not simply to what is expedient. If that ideal is rarely reached, it remains something to strive for and connects official statistics to a broader vision of American democracy as a republic in which reasoned persuasion remains the ultimate goal.
Despite challenges, that ideal has held sway throughout most of our history, supported by both Republicans and Democrats. But it is not the only political vision for official statistics. In another, competing approach, government data should merely reflect the whims of whoever happens to be in power.
As part of the executive branch under the authority of the president, federal statistical agencies are entirely at the president’s disposal with no external accountability. There is no need to provide evidence for alleged misconduct, or to conduct independent reviews, or to give detailed justifications for methodological choices. Of course, such arbitrary exercise of power undercuts citizens’ trust in official data and their ability to assess the consequences of government action. In doing so, it undermines a key support for reasoned democracy.
The trouble with the Trump administration’s decision to fire McEntarfer is not that it politicized a government agency. It’s what that decision suggests about the administration’s understanding of American political life and the place of shared empirical knowledge within it.
Thomas A. Stapleford is an associate professor in the Program of Liberal Studies at the University of Notre Dame. He is the author of “The Cost of Living in America: A Political History of Economic Statistics, 1880–2000” and is completing a book on “The Ethics of Official Facts.”
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