This week, I dug into something the Commerce Department did quietly back in August: it scrapped its own rules against political interference in official statistics. Those rules were insulation — the language saying that undue influence, inappropriate influence, political interference in the data were all out of bounds. The Commerce Secretary, Howard Lutnick, crossed them out. Which means official reports can now be delayed, buried, reworded, or reworked. They can be directed to use politically convenient methods, data, or commentary. And Commerce is the parent of both the Census Bureau and the Bureau of Economic Analysis, so some of our most important economic and social statistics are now open to political manipulation.
You can catch up on that here:
Now it’s time for The Professor Is In, where I sit down with my producer Augusta to answer audience questions.
How can we trust any government data?
This was, by far, the most asked question from our readers. If the administration is stripping away protections on integrity — and if they’re doing it so quietly, with so little scrutiny — how can we trust any numbers they publish?
The answer: we can trust the numbers it has produced so far because there’s absolutely no evidence they’re fake.
I’m going to look you in the eye while I say this (well, proverbially. If you want to look me in my eye, watch the video). I promise you that as soon as I think we cannot believe the numbers, I will tell you.
This is very important. What they did here is change the rules to allow the Census Bureau to create propaganda in the future. That is different from a claim that Census Bureau data are unreliable now. It says: look out, this could happen. So far, nothing has happened.
In fact, I believe that the career public servants are going to continue to do their jobs. They’ll continue doing good economic measurement, because that’s what they do.
There’s one glaring exception, though: the report on so-called “voter fraud” in the 2020 election. When that came out, I kept my promise. I said that it was a lie. It was incoherent. It was wrong about nearly everything. More on that here:
This broad weakening of the statistical integrity of government science ruined my day when I figured out what it all meant. Pushing political interference through official government statistics destroyed a decades-long tradition of dedication to the truth. The people at the Census Bureau work incredibly hard to defend the reputation of that organization, and now it will take decades to put that back.
But we don’t live in a world where you get to make up your own facts.
I’m angry about this change at the Commerce Department because it moves us closer to a world in which a trusted source of truth may become less trusted. But the Census Bureau is one of the world’s leading statistical agencies. And, with the exception of that single report, it has been absolutely relentless in its pursuit of the truth.
I know that there are people who are so angry at politics right now that all they want to do is throw away inconvenient truths. That might help you feel less awful, and it might help you win a debate on the basketball court, but throwing away our shared reality will not lead us to a clearer view of the world. It certainly won’t lead to better policies or better economics.
That doesn’t mean every number is true
I’m not asking anyone to be a fool. A fool would say, “Well, the president may have lied in the past, but I’m gonna believe him this time.” In the past, if a number came out of the White House, from a cabinet secretary or a political appointee, then that number was true but cherry picked. In the present, it’s not even true.
The numbers the president cites are often made up. Drug prices in America haven’t fallen 600%. The U.S. has not had $20 trillion worth of investment under President Trump, because that would be nearly all of GDP. Pick your stat — it’s not hard to find one that’s completely false.
But numbers that come out of an official statistical agency — the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Census Bureau, the Bureau of Economic Analysis — those numbers have always been true.
As a specialist, I can tell you which numbers are real. For everyone else that’s a hard job, and it’s about to get harder. Because what they’ve done is take the one category I’ve always been able to vouch for — official statistics from independent agencies — and change the rules so that it doesn’t have to be true in the future.
Other questions Augusta put to me:
If someone did want to cook an official statistic, how would they go about it? (Answer: not by opening Microsoft Excel, deleting one number and typing another.)
In light of all this, can we trust the most recent jobs numbers?
Is there any chance a future administration puts these protections back?
And how is a person without a PhD in economics supposed to sort the real numbers from the fake ones?
So what are the rest of us supposed to do?
Check the address. The Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Bureau of Economic Analysis, the Census Bureau, NOAA, the Federal Reserve, the Congressional Budget Office — these are statistical agencies, and their job is to tell you the truth. The Office of Management and Budget, the Council of Economic Advisers, the National Economic Council all sound every bit as official. But their address is 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, and that is a political organization devoted to political ends.
That test still works today. What Commerce did in August is make it possible that one day it won’t.
So resist the urge to go nihilistic. I suspect that’s what’s on offer here — if you decide the Census Bureau can’t be believed, then nothing can be believed, and if there’s no truth, there’s no foundation for anything. No good policy. No honest argument. No way of telling whether any of this is working.
And Washington won’t care about this issue, or any issue, unless voters care about it first. So notice it. Talk about it. Make some noise about it.
I’ll keep watching the numbers. And I’ll keep my promise: the day I stop believing them, you’ll be the first to know.
Justin -- I sent your column on the changes to other economists, and it will make its way (or already has) to the Statistics Committee of the National Association for Business Economics (NABE). This will be very broadly known within the business economist community very soon. Lots of Fed economists at NABE as well.