Former Trump advisor criticizes Trump’s timing on ousting America’s data czar: ‘Like firing the referee’

Economy·Donald TrumpFormer Trump advisor criticizes Trump’s timing on ousting America’s data czar: ‘ firing the referee’By Eva RoytburgBy Eva Roytburg Stephen Moore, while disagreeing that the numbers were manipulated, concurred with Trump that the BLS needs a new “Mr

Fix-It” to head the bureau

Andrew Harrer / Bloomberg—Getty ImagesPresident Donald Trump’s decision to fire Erika McEntarfer, the commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), last Friday after a dismal jobs report is drawing criticism not just from his usual opponents, but also from his allies

The revision constitutes the largest downward revision to the jobs numbers in almost 60 years

The president wrote in a Truth Social post Friday that McEntarfer, a Biden administration appointee, “manipulated” and “faked” the jobs report numbers for political gain

He said he would replace her with someone “more competent.” Transitioning away from survey data Moore, while disagreeing that the numbers were manipulated, concurred with Trump that the BLS needs a new “Mr

Fix-It” to head the bureau

He said that in his 40 years of working in economic re, he had never seen the jobs numbers become so unreliable

Recent economic data is plagued by the same issue as political polling data: Nobody wants to pick up the phone anymore, Moore said

The monthly jobs report relies heavily on surveys of es and households, which worked when everyone used landline phones, but is less reliable in the digital age. “The cedures the BLS is using are 75 years old,” Moore added. “They need to be completely revamped.” The pandemic appears to have accelerated the trend of people ignoring pollers’ calls

Days before Trump fired McEntarfer, a bipartisan group of economists—including Nobel Laureate Paul Romer—wrote a letter to Congress asking for funding to modernize the data-collection cess

Agencies need the space and money to “restore” survey response rates, while also experimenting with new means of data collection, the economists argued. “Transitioning to a system in which less survey data is bl with more administrative and private sector data, while preserving data integrity and privacy standards, is the generationally important task facing statistical agencies today,” the economists wrote

However, reers at the San Francisco Federal Reserve, who studied survey responsiveness earlier this year, found that while declining response rates present concerns for the reliability of data, it didn’t necessarily lead to larger-than-average revisions to reports the monthly jobs report

Claire Mersol, an economist at BLS, told the Wall Street Journal that much of the revisions done to the previous numbers were part of “routine recalculation of seasonal factors.” “Typically, the monthly revisions have offsetting movements within industries—one goes up, one goes down,” Mersol said. “In June, most revisions were negative.” In other words, the sharply negative revisions could have just been chance

Even if the data has become more unreliable, some Republican allies of the president said that firing the head of the BLS would do little to fix the blem

Rand Paul, a Republican from Kentucky, told NBC News that he questioned how the move would imve BLS’ accuracy. “I’m going to look into it, but first impression is that you can’t really make the numbers different or better by firing the people doing the counting,” he said

Lisa Murkowski from Alaska said that she doesn’t trust the numbers, but the move makes it worse. “And when you fire people, then it makes people trust them even less,” she said

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