What Could Go Wrong?
PBS Marketplace reports on the disappearance of government produced data:
Government data is at risk. Federal funding for the main statistical agencies — like the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Commerce Department — has been tight for years. But since the Trump administration took office in January, threats to the availability and comprehensiveness of federal data have reached a new level, impacting everything from national health and crime statistics to key economic reports.
Last September, Drew DeSilver, an analyst at the Pew Research Center, clicked onto the Office of Personnel Management’s FedScope database to find out what percentage of the federal workforce was Black or Latino. (He published the findings earlier this year.)
After the Trump administration took office, he checked the database again and got a rude awakening. “The diversity module, which included all the racial and ethnic breakdowns — that has disappeared,” DeSilver said. That, combined with the fact that the database hasn’t been updated since the administration took office (the latest data is for September 2024), makes it more difficult to figure out how massive federal job cuts initiated by DOGE are impacting Black and Latino workers.
[…]
Denice Ross, who served until December 2024 as U.S. Chief Data Scientist, said this is part of a broad pattern across federal statistical agencies: “The targeted, surgical removal of data sets, or elements of data sets, that are not aligned with the administration’s priorities.” [That would be all the anti-DEI edicts]
[…]
There’s another way federal data is being undermined, said Steve Pierson: across-the-board job cuts initiated by DOGE starting at the beginning of the Trump administration, which Pierson estimates led to 15% to 40% staff attrition at some statistical agencies. “The biggest impacts so far have been just the reductions of force, which are collateral damage,” said Pierson, leaving fewer trained statisticians to sample, survey, and analyze results for error, seasonal, or regional variation. (ASA is monitoring individual actions to change federal databases and data collection here.)
This, combined with funding cuts, is starting to impact core economic data, like the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ consumer price index, said Michael Strain at the American Enterprise Institute.“We’ve seen the government do less field surveys to come up with the official measure of consumer price inflation, and that’s just because they don’t have adequate funding,” he said. “If the government slightly mismeasures consumer price inflation, that can mean spending hundreds of billions of dollars on Social Security payments that it shouldn’t be spending.”
I am very surprised that Wall St. and the business community aren’t protesting this but maybe they just think that vibes and mind-reading are a better way to gauge the health of the economy. It’s worked out well for them so far. Maybe they can just keep their heads in the sand and pretend that Trump’s delusions and lies are actual reality zand everyone will get even wealthier.
On the other hand, they may be engaged in a ritual killing of the golden goose. We’ll have to see.