The Trump administration is proposing a new rule that would make it much easier to fire federal workers. The rule would affect an estimated 50,000 federal employees.
There are concerns it could touch staff at the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which produces data that other government agencies and private companies rely on.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics releases the monthly jobs report, the consumer price index, the producer price index — economists’ bread and butter.
“These statistics help us understand which metro areas across the country are growing faster or losing jobs,” said economist Jed Kolko, who was an undersecretary at the Commerce Department in the Biden administration.
He’s concerned that the proposed rule could sweep economists at the Bureau of Labor Statistics, or BLS, into a new job category: workers who can be fired at will without the usual appeals process. Kolko is worried that it could be harder for BLS economists anxious about losing their jobs to deliver bad news.
And that “might cause them to face pressure to change a methodology or change the way numbers are presented in order to look more favorable to the administration,” he said.
Erica Groshen, a former BLS commissioner now at Cornell, said that — for example — if the statistics looked bad for the Trump administration, BLS “could discover some glitch in the way the numbers are calculated and say we have to withhold it until we’re sure that the numbers are right.”
Ultimately, Groshen cautioned that people could lose faith in the quality of BLS data. (I reached out to the BLS for comment on all of this but didn’t hear back by deadline.)
Judge Glock at the Manhattan Institute, a right-leaning think tank, said these are valid concerns. But he thinks BLS economists would resist pressure to manipulate data, even if they could be fired more easily, because their professional reputations would be at risk.
“If one of them manipulates data clearly, that person — even if they were rewarded internally — will likely have a tough time for the rest of their life finding a good position,” he said.
Glock added that even if a BLS economist in the new job category were fired, they would be replaced by a career civil servant — not a political appointee.
The rule establishing the new fire-at-will job category isn’t final yet. It’s still in the middle of a comment period. Plus, federal worker unions and their supporters have filed lawsuits challenging the proposed rule.
