(Bloomberg Opinion) — How much longer can we trust government statistics?
After staffing shortages at the Bureau of Labor Statistics reportedly affected the agency’s ability to collect data for the Consumer Price Index last month, a handful of Democratic senators wrote to the Department of Labor demanding to know how it affected the agency’s statistics. Earlier this year, the government made the radical move to dissolve several external expert advisory committees that served the BLS and the Bureau of Economic Analysis. Meanwhile, across industries as diverse as medicine, insurance and education, professionals are dealing with the outright disappearance of data from government websites.
But to answer the question: We can we trust the statistics at least until the “Improving Performance, Accountability and Responsiveness in the Civil Service” regulation, proposed by the Office of Personnel Management in April, goes into effect. After that, all bets are off.
The gaps in the CPI data and the dissolution of advisory committees illustrate the two threats facing government data: inadequate funding and political interference.
The former has been cooking for a while. The BLS’s budget is down 20% in real terms since 2010, and President Donald Trump’s 2026 budget proposes an additional 8% cut. Surveys aren’t free to run or maintain, and they certainly aren’t free to improve. The Census Bureau has long wanted to modernize the Current Population Survey — which produces one of the most paramount statistics of all, the unemployment rate. It recently designed a three-year plan to make the survey more accurate and cost effective. Not for nothing, those advisory agencies and other outside experts had been sounding the alarm for more funding and pushing for modernization in the collecting and publishing of public data.
The threat of political interference, however, is new. It started during the presidential campaign last fall, when monthly employment reports showed a strong labor market. Trump and his surrogates immediately accused the agency of producing “fake numbers.” That cooled after he won — but if there is any kind of turn in the numbers, the false allegations will almost certainly arise again.
On one level, it’s just empty if destructive rhetoric that undermines trust but doesn’t affect the production of the numbers. Unfortunately, the administration’s actions won’t stop at rhetoric.
In October 2020, Trump issued Executive Order 13957 to establish “Schedule F” in the civil service. Its purpose was to reclassify federal employees in certain positions and make them subject to the hiring and firing discretion of the agency lead. In other words: The goal was to undermine merit-based hiring and replace it with political hiring.
President Joe Biden rescinded the order in January 2021, but Trump restored in in January 2025. Under this new rule, federal employees whose jobs are reclassified lose their civil service protections, which include appealing a termination they believe was based on political reasons rather than performance.
This order was officially published in the Federal Register in April, and public comments — some 40,000 of them — were received until May. The administration is supposed to take the comments onboard and issue the final rule, which will then take effect 30 or 60 days later. If and when that happens, more details about how exactly it will work will be announced. But in practice, the president will have the ability to fire any federal employee he chooses.
It is not hard to see how all this might create problems for government agencies such as the BLS.
In 2019, former BLS Commissioner Erica Groshen was asked about the possibility of manipulating government statistics. She explained that it would be impossible for a political appointee to do so — because the staff would prevent it. “If I had tried to do that while I was commissioner, I know with certainty that the first people to turn me in would have been the employees of the BLS,” she said.
So to bring all this back to the question at the beginning: Government data is trustworthy because of civil servants, but they are in the administration’s sights. Once the new rule reclassifying federal employees goes into effect, the staff that produces and maintains the data is at risk. And once they are, the data is, too.
Of course, manipulating a report like the Current Population Survey would be difficult, given its depth of detail and the fact that all the raw data itself is released to the public. It’s more likely that the government will just stop publishing the data to the same level of detail — so if there were some changes to the headline numbers, the reasons would be hard to verify. That seems to explain the public data that’s already been pulled, whether it’s about climate or Social Security Administration wait-time performance.
Integrity and transparency are at the heart of public statistics. It’s no surprise that they would be under attack by an administration that values neither.
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This column reflects the personal views of the author and does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
Kathryn Anne Edwards is a labor economist and independent policy consultant.
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