Firing the Data-Collectors
Jobs numbers make it all come together: “I have been a bit mystified by the economic data over the last few months. With the combination of tariffs, inappropriate fiscal expansion, immigration crackdowns, and persistently elevated long-term interest rates, why had we not been seeing significant drag on job growth?” asks Josh Barro at Very Serious. Recent jobs numbers have made that less mystifying: July growth was terribly weak, while May and June numbers were revised significantly downward, with 258,000 fewer jobs in those months than first reported by the Labor Department.
“As Jason Furman wrote before these jobs numbers came in, it seemed tariffs were already boosting inflation and dampening growth at the margin, albeit not to a sufficient degree to tip the economy into recession,” continues Barro. “Now the jobs numbers are also showing significant weakness, even though they’re not yet showing the bottom falling out of the labor market. The last remaining bullish economic indicator is the stock market. Like Furman, I can’t explain why stocks are doing so well in spite of everything. But the rest of the economic data appears to be aligning with the idea that the economy is weakening.”
Interestingly, something appears to be happening at the Bureau of Labor Statistics:
Trump announces he has directed his team to fire the Commissioner of Labor Statistics.
“Important numbers like this must be fair and accurate, they can’t be manipulated for political purposes.” pic.twitter.com/MdFMwnNH77
— Acyn (@Acyn) August 1, 2025
Plenty of people are arguing that Trump is behaving like an authoritarian. “This is the kind of thing you would only expect to see in a banana republic,” said Janet Yellen, the former chair of the Federal Reserve (and former treasury secretary). But this take seems reasonable to me:
The gap between positive report to negative revision was staggering — though press didn’t always cover the revision (surprise!). People should be reassured that there’s accountability here. This is a Good thing. Keeping someone on with this record would be Bad.
— J.P. Freire (@JPFreire) August 1, 2025
Without endorsing Trump’s conspiratorial speculations that the numbers are being deliberately manipulated to hurt him and favor Democrats, I do think you can make a case that the bureaucrats collecting this data have been doing a poor job.
So how exactly does the BLS currently collect this data?
“The BLS collects jobs data in two separate surveys,” reports CNN. “The fi
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