Trump sacks the statisticians, slashes the staff, and then scolds the Bureau of Labor Statistics for bad numbers—proof that this government is destroying itself in public.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics, once a temple of dry but necessary arithmetic, now resembles a vaudeville stage where the scenery has collapsed and the actors are improvising with broken props.
A third of its leadership posts sit vacant, the commissioner has been dismissed like a schoolboy caught smoking behind the gym, and the staff shuffle papers wondering if anyone upstairs knows what the numbers mean anymore.
The Trump administration’s line is that the BLS has failed America. Too many revisions, too many “vastly inaccurate” data points, too much fudging around with the truth.
Which, of course, is a bit like a carnival barker berating the bearded lady for excessive hair. The jobs report is inherently revised as new responses come in. Everyone who has ever looked at these tables knows this.
To demand that labor statistics arrive fully formed, perfect, and without error is like demanding that a newborn baby emerge house-trained and bilingual.
Yet the White House insists the solution is to clear out the veterans, dismiss the commissioner, and replace her with a fellow from the Heritage Foundation—an economist whose credentials lean more toward partisan catechism than toward the thankless grind of survey methodology.
The result: an agency that has lost 20 percent of its staff since Trump took office, and now lurches along like a bus whose driver has been replaced by a back-seat heckler.
What is government if not the organized collection and interpretation of facts? And what are we watching but a government happily destroying its own organs of knowledge in public? A republic cannot long endure when it declares war on arithmetic.
You can dispute policy; you cannot dispute the multiplication table. Yet here is Trump, wagging a finger at the BLS for its revisions, while presiding over the hollowing out of the very office meant to prevent such confusion.
“Yes, hello, Bureau of Labor Statistics?… Right, we need jobs numbers by Friday… What do you mean there’s no one left to count? You let them resign? Voluntarily?… Well, can’t you just round up to the nearest million?”
The pause. The sigh. The punchline: “Okay, fine, just write ‘a lot’ under employment, and ‘not so good’ under inflation. The president will love it.”
Behind the gag lies a grim truth. Without leadership, the BLS cannot modernize its surveys, cannot recruit technical staff, cannot even explain to the public why revisions occur.
Trust in its numbers erodes, and with that erosion goes the credibility of fiscal policy, monetary decisions, and ultimately the stability of markets themselves. The so-called “gold standard” of economic data is now ringed with tarnish, applied by its own overseers.
This is a democracy undermined by its own elected clowns, a state content to amputate its head while insisting it has never seen more clearly.
“Ladies and gentlemen, the unemployment rate is unknowable at this time. Please enjoy the complimentary peanuts.”
