drphungky

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.

Totally reasonable question. The question is would you rather have very accurate numbers three months late, or fairly accurate numbers barely a month late? That’s the calculus, and in the current era of a complete lack of trust in government, there’s…kind of an argument for three months late, but really businesses and the public overwhelmingly want the numbers earlier and can adjust based on predictions of revisions (which they do), so one month it is. Plus, these are very old programs and the publishing procedures have been set for quite a long time.

I’d caveat though that there is absolutely no reason you can’t trust these numbers. See my comment above in this thread about reliability of BLS statistics. In an era where there are legions of former public health officials who quit and blow the whistle on things happening in that sector, I’m not sure what makes people think that a bunch of statistics nerds wouldn’t do the same thing. Plus, as the ostensibly pro business side, Republicans like accurate Principal Federal Economic Indicators at least as much as Democrats. Who do you think uses these stats?

That is literally how unemployment is measured in the US. These are employment numbers, which are different than unemployment. You’re either wildly uninformed or spreading FUD. Stop.

This has absolutely nothing to do with that, and the commissioner also has absolutely no control on any numbers that come out of the BLS, only the language in final reports. There’s not some magic “cook the books” button the commissioner can push, anyway. This is an org with thousands of employees and hundreds of automated programs and processes that can’t just be changed willy nilly, with monitored databases and backups upon failsafes and legions of bureaucrats who would absolutely scream to high heaven if there were even a whisper of a hint of manipulation. You can’t have a conspiracy with thousands of statistics nerds who swear an oath to be impartial. You just can’t.

And anyway, there are ALWAYS jobs revision numbers. In times of expansion, they’re usually revised upwards, and in times of contraction they’re usually revised downwards. This is only (financial) news because it happens, not because it’s a surprise. Everyone could have predicted this, and indeed when you read articles before ethe revisions come out they often mention the upcoming revision. The surprise is usually the magnitude, not usually the direction and certainly not the fact that there is a revision.

This is just caused by the structure of the employment survey, where bigger firms answer the questions faster but smaller firms usually take longer to get their answers in due to not having dedicated staff, ease of gathering the numbers, or long standing procedures - take your pick. Those same smaller firms are also the ones most likely to be affected by swings in the economy, so in times of expansion are more likely to be hiring, and in uncertain or downswing times, are more likely to have lower hiring or lower growth. But the initial numbers assume things are more or less steady until they get official responses in, and then revise to the more accurate numbers. So big nothing burger from a reliability of statistics standpoint, this is just the choice made between having accurate statistics three months late, or kinda accurate statistics a month late that are then revised to be be more accurate.

As for this report, the only news here is that job growth is still sluggish, confirmed by stats - not that there’s some grand conspiracy because people don’t take the time to understand how things actually work. Being complicated or obtuse doesn’t mean it’s corrupt. It means you’re out of your element.

I’m all for delivery robots. The idea of having people in gas guzzling cars taking up huge amounts of city space while polluting, just so you can have a private taxi for your burrito is crazy. The main issue here is them taking up sidewalk infrastructure instead of car infrastructure. Fix that and we’ve got absolutely no problems. Tiny electric vehicles SHOULD be delivering things. Fixing this infrastructure problem is another great time to fix deliveries in general blocking side lanes, bike lanes, and slowing traffic where it does actually need to flow.

While we’re at it, fix all traffic. Switch to a modified Dutch design of three types of roads (highways, distributor roads, and access roads) to further eliminate car interactions with pedestrians, cyclist, and yes probably small bot interactions. They should only be mixing on access roads. Dedicated and separated car lanes, bike lanes, and walking paths, and shared delivery lanes for bots and manned cars on access roads. It’ll take time, but a simple plan and slow progress will eventually fix things and cause less havoc like adding cars did to cities that were all horse based.

“Won’t someone think of the buggy whip makers?”

Not saying you’re against it, but having an actual social safety net and not worrying about particular industries/workers/special interests is a WAY better way to think about governance and change.

Kinda crazy how those same construction and civil engineers are going to be investigating if the normal means of protection for this very foreseeable event was done correctly, because we design things to avoid these head on collisions:

https://wjla.com/features/i-team/questions-investigators-will-be-asking-about-francis-scott-key-bridge-collapse-baltimore-container-ship-collision-port-engineering-economy-shipping-hub

Also, not for nothing but even if they find out the dolphins in place were sufficient based on prior standards…this event will likely update the standards, same as the sun bridge in the 80s. Regulations and best practices are written in blood.