I suppose it is understandable to consider the recent firing of Erika McEntarfer, the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, as just another casualty among the mass firings President Donald Trump has initiated to restructure our government. But her firing portends something more alarming: It moves us another step toward authoritarian rule here in the United States.
Ruth Ben-Ghiat, author of “Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present,” is considered an expert on the “strongman” playbook. She was recently asked by a panel of journalists to position the United States on a scale of zero to 10 in terms of where it ranks as being under authoritarian rule; she gave us a seven.
Ben-Ghiat’s response coincided with the firing of McEntarfer for having filed the July jobs report that showed a substantial slowdown in hiring. Trump, confronted with facts that he could not easily control, lashed out claiming the figures were rigged, showing a growing intolerance toward those who will not bend to his will.
Trump was reacting to not only the 73,000 jobs created in July — a lower number than many economists had expected — but also the downward revision totaling more than 250,000 jobs during two previous months, May and June, when employment only increased by 33,000 jobs.
Revisions are a standard part of the BLS process. The revised numbers, which are released one month and two months after the initial release, are more reliable because they include more thorough data.
Trump called that downward revision “a major mistake,” claiming instead that “the Economy is BOOMING under TRUMP.”
However, National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett, one of Trump’s top economic advisers, wasn’t able to point to much when asked for evidence to support the president’s allegation that a former labor official rigged revisions to job numbers.
“The move cemented many fears that Mr. Trump, who has already fired inspectors general and installed loyalists in the Justice Department, would eventually root out government officials who report politically inconvenient data or intimidate them for publicly disclosing bad news,” wrote Zolan Kanno-Youngs earlier this month in The New York Times.
Jerome Powell, the Federal Reserve chair who has defied Trump’s demands for interest rate cuts, has been subject to “withering and relentless” criticism and insults from the president. With the recent job numbers indicating that the economy is slowing under Trump’s watch, the president also called on Powell to resign.
Ever since Trump’s first term, many observers have speculated that he could undermine American democracy and move the country in an overtly authoritarian direction.
That possibility has grown more plausible as he seeks to prejudice a growing list of American institutions that have stood in his way, including the intelligence community, the F.B.I. and Justice Department, the courts, the mainstream media and the integrity of elections themselves.
Now Trump is attacking a critical agency responsible for collecting and disseminating economic statistics, including employment and inflation data, which are essential for policymakers, businesses, and the public.
“The stakes are high for having statistical purity,” wrote Louis Jackson in Politifact. “Presidential approval ratings rise and fall based on key measurements such as the unemployment rate, new job creation and the consumer price index — all of which are calculated solely or partly by BLS.”
Jackson added, “And countless transactions also depend on those calculations, including those by financial traders, private businesses, international trading partners and individual Americans’ stock market holdings.”
The implications of McEntarfer’s firing extend beyond her individual case. It raises questions about the independence and potential politicization of the BLS and the reliability of the economic data it produces going forward.
“Conventional wisdom says that autocrats manipulate news through censorship; however, when it comes to economic affairs — a highly sensitive topic for modern autocrats — the government’s ability to censor information effectively is limited, because citizens can benchmark the official news against their incomes, market prices, and other observables,” wrote Arturas Rozenas and Denis Stukal in The University of Chicago Press Journals.
Instead of censoring economic facts, they are framed to make the government appear as a competent manager. Bad news is systematically blamed on external factors, whereas good news is attributed to domestic politicians. However, what Trump is doing is escalating unprecedented attacks on the independence and integrity of the federal statistical system.
The Friends of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, an independent group of outside organizations dedicated to economic statistics and analysis that supports the mission of the BLS, described in a recent statement how U.S. official statistics are considered the gold standard globally. When leaders of other nations have politicized economic data, it has destroyed public trust in all official statistics and in government science.
Their statement says Trump’s politicization of BLS data is a great disservice to the agency and its workers as well as the “entire federal statistical system which this country has relied on for almost 150 years.”
Part of the strongman playbook is to control and dominate the information landscape to undermine opposition to their harmful policies while advancing their personal and political interests. In our case, this is coming at the cost of the interests of the United States, leaving us weaker and more vulnerable.
When you think about it, Trump is acting like a football coach who wants the referee fired because his team didn’t score more touchdowns.
But this isn’t a game.
Dr. William Kolbe, an Andover resident, is a retired high school and college teacher and former Peace Corps volunteer in Tonga and El Salvador. He can be reached at bila.kolbe9@gmail.com