For nearly two years, the job market Americans were told about has been significantly stronger than the one that actually existed, and the Federal Reserve made a major policy decision based on numbers that have since been quietly rewritten.
Secondly, Trump did not fire anyone other than the commissioner, and did not replace anyone at the BLS. They lost a ton due to DOGE and the DRP, but were under a hiring freeze until recently. You can check USA jobs for past listings.
And yes, while leadership could theoretically push certain measurements or methodologies that might skew things in a certain direction, again, at the BLS that functionally can’t be done without a large hue and cry. The commissioner has very little say in program methodologies. Erica Groshen, a former commissioner, is extremely active on social media and often mentions how if there were anything out of the ordinary rank and file would go nuts. You can imagine that’s true given the org has people on both political sides, and gets accused by the other party’s supporters of cooking the books no matter who is in charge, even though methodology changes extremely slowly and is always published online.
To that matter, I am unaware of any changes to inflation measurements during Trump 2, other than I think alternative data sources (e.g. getting datasets from companies/third parties rather than measuring prices at a store), but I’d have to go dig through their methodology publications, which are all wide open and public in the website as well.
The takeaway here is that there is so much sunshine on all of these processes and data it’s functionally impossible for the stats to be a lie. Even earlier reporting this year that imputations (estimating data they can’t physically measure) were way up was still way below the margin of error, and that alone was a huge “scandal”. That was down to the Trump admin starving them of money and staff, and guess what happened a few months later? Suddenly they’re hiring again, because I assume Republicans behind the scenes got pissy about less accurate data, even if it didn’t actually change anything except the measures of accuracy.
Well to your first point, you can go yourself to their website. Everything is public, and they even have a handy page just on revisions: https://www.bls.gov/web/empsit/cesnaicsrev.htm
Secondly, Trump did not fire anyone other than the commissioner, and did not replace anyone at the BLS. They lost a ton due to DOGE and the DRP, but were under a hiring freeze until recently. You can check USA jobs for past listings.
And yes, while leadership could theoretically push certain measurements or methodologies that might skew things in a certain direction, again, at the BLS that functionally can’t be done without a large hue and cry. The commissioner has very little say in program methodologies. Erica Groshen, a former commissioner, is extremely active on social media and often mentions how if there were anything out of the ordinary rank and file would go nuts. You can imagine that’s true given the org has people on both political sides, and gets accused by the other party’s supporters of cooking the books no matter who is in charge, even though methodology changes extremely slowly and is always published online.
To that matter, I am unaware of any changes to inflation measurements during Trump 2, other than I think alternative data sources (e.g. getting datasets from companies/third parties rather than measuring prices at a store), but I’d have to go dig through their methodology publications, which are all wide open and public in the website as well.
The takeaway here is that there is so much sunshine on all of these processes and data it’s functionally impossible for the stats to be a lie. Even earlier reporting this year that imputations (estimating data they can’t physically measure) were way up was still way below the margin of error, and that alone was a huge “scandal”. That was down to the Trump admin starving them of money and staff, and guess what happened a few months later? Suddenly they’re hiring again, because I assume Republicans behind the scenes got pissy about less accurate data, even if it didn’t actually change anything except the measures of accuracy.