Editors at National Review Online respond to one of President Donald Trump’s recent outbursts.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics sends a survey to employers each month to figure out how many people they employ, as part of the jobs report. In the good old days before Covid, that survey had a response rate of about 60 percent. From respondents’ guesses about how many people they employ, the BLS had to guess about how many people are employed in this nation of 340 million souls.
That’s a really hard job. The BLS employs some of the best statisticians in the world, and they happen to be pretty good at it, often getting within a tenth of a percent of the final workforce numbers.
Then, Covid happened, and the establishment survey response rate dropped like a rock. …
… Within government, Donald Trump’s appointee as BLS commissioner, William Beach, has been a leader in calling for modernizing the surveys that statistical agencies rely on. As commissioner from 2019 to 2023, Beach asked Congress for several million dollars in funding — peanuts, in federal budget terms — to redo the survey along the lines of other countries such as the U.K., which now uses an online-first methodology. It never came to be.
Beach organized a letter to Congress and the executive branch signed by numerous statistical experts in February of this year outlining the long-running problems statistical agencies have been facing. Budgets have not kept up with costs that are out of the agencies’ control, and staff who were doing vital work have been cut. Neither Congress nor the administration took action.
Beach has called Trump’s firing of his successor, Erika McEntarfer, “totally groundless,” and he’s correct. The issues with jobs reporting are not about politics or McEntarfer’s competence. In fact, they are exactly the kind of thing that an administration committed to technological modernization and government efficiency should find to be in its wheelhouse. And there’s no reason to think this particular jobs report was any more flawed than any other.
McEntarfer was not standing in the way of this modernization. Trump was mad about the jobs report, so he fired her.
