In the United States, federal government officials have traditionally relied on nonpartisan data when making decisions — including data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). But former BLS Commissioner Erica L. Groshen fears that President-elect Donald Trump will interfere with that data after he returns to the White House.
Salon's Nicholas Liu, in an article published on January 10, reports that Trump is "widely expected to revive the 'Schedule F' employment category, which would expose thousands of federal employees to easy dismissal." And Groshen warns that Trump's interference could seriously damage and corrupt the federal government's statistics system.
Groshen told Salon, "Senior civil servants would now be vulnerable to being fired for political reasons, and have pressures on them to do things that would violate the norms that protect trust."
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Historically, Liu notes, BLS employees have been "protected from political interference by a number of safeguards." But those protections, according to Groshen, could erode during Trump's second presidency.
Groshen told Salon, "Federal statistics are information infrastructure for our economy. They promote good evidence-based decision making in many, many spheres, and are mechanism for us to jointly decide on what are the public goods — roads, national defense, clean air — that we need, and to then make sure that we have them so that our country functions effectively. Without impartial data on poverty rates, the government wouldn't be able to efficiently allocate money to fight poverty."
The former BLS commissioner added, "The same applies to unemployment insurance programs based on local unemployment rates, or apportionment of congressional seats based on census data, or any number of other functions."
According to Groshen, manipulating government data and making it less reliable could hurt businesses in a variety of ways.
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Groshen told Salon, "There's now the risk of a world where you have more industrial unrest between workers and employers, more protracted and continual negotiations about a lot of things that are now handled pretty smoothly, more uncertainty in financial markets — and financial markets hate uncertainty, so higher interest rates because people feel more uncertain — more spending on lawyers and negotiators, and generally conflict both in the public and private sector."
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Read the full Salon article at this link.