There’s historical precedent for that fear. Countries like Greece and Argentina have been both been punished by investors for putting out manufactured numbers in the past.
“President Trump has just taken one very negative stop along a slippery slope,” Alan Blinder, a former vice chair of the Federal Reserve, told CNN. “The next worry is going to be manipulation” of data.
At stake is the health of an economy relied upon by nearly every person on earth, directly or indirectly. The US economy affects everyone from Americans in glitzy Manhattan skyscrapers to, quite literally, garbage pickers living in developing nation slums.
But while Greece famously faked its way into the European Union and Argentina to this day remains embroiled in legal fights over its own sham numbers, there key differences here: The US economy is the world’s biggest, buoyed by its global dominance and its years of strength.
The Trump administration says firing Erika McEntarfer wasn’t about politics but was instead about making BLS data more rigorous and accurate.
“Historically abnormal revisions in BLS data over the past few years since COVID have called into question the BLS’s accuracy, reliability, and confidence. President Trump believes that businesses, households, and policymakers deserve accurate data to inform their decision-making, and he will restore America’s trust in the BLS,” said White House spokeswoman Taylor Rogers in a statement to CNN.
Still, economists warn, the United States is at something of a crossroads now, waiting to see what happens to data series that economists have praised as the gold standard, even if many agree that model updating and modernization could make major improvements to the data’s accuracy.
“There’s no substitute for credible government data,” said Michael Heydt, the lead sovereign analyst at rating agency Morningstar DBRS.
Trump fired Dr. Erika McEntarfer, the commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, shortly after the August 1 jobs report showed sharply slower jobs growth than expected for July – and significant downward revisions to data from June and May. Trump accused McEntarfer, without evidence, of manipulating the reports for “political purposes.”
Analysts begged to differ. The US is “a world leader in providing high-quality data,” Heydt said. “The BLS in particular is kind of a world class institution… The US for a long time has been kind of the gold standard for data.”
William Beach, a former Trump BLS commissioner, told CNN previously that “there’s no way” for McEntarfer or others to rig the data. “By the time the commissioner sees the number, they’re all prepared, they’re locked into the computer system,” he said. “There’s no hands-on at all for the commissioner.”
But large revisions in the bureau’s data have raised eyebrows, not just this month, but in the past as well. A preliminary annual revision in August 2024, for example, showed the US economy had added 818,000 fewer jobs over the past year than previously reported.
Those kinds of large revisions might suggest deeper issues, like how the BLS gets their data and constructs their economic models, said Kathryn Rooney Vera, the chief market strategist and chief economist at financial services company StoneX.
“Several economists and research teams I personally engage with have flagged these as structural issues with the data long before Trump’s involvement or the firing of the BLS chief,” Rooney Vera told CNN.
Still, the US has other sources of data, both public and private, to round out a fuller picture of the economy. Shapiro pointed to the Census Bureau and the Bureau of Economic Analysis.
“These institutions are made up virtually 100% by statisticians and economists,” Shapiro said. “They’re utterly nonpolitical in their jobs.”
