Critics worry new Trump proposal would make it easier for him to exercise retribution

A recently proposed regulation from the White House’s Office of Personnel Management could give the Trump administration far greater leeway to meddle in the work of federal statistical agencies that generate key economic data, the Guardian reported Sunday.

The proposal stems from an executive order signed by President Donald Trump on January 20, right after his inauguration. It would shift roughly 50,000 currently unspecified permanent civil service roles into a new “policy/career” classification. This change would make it easier to dismiss those employees on grounds of “poor performance or misconduct.”

Erica Groshen, a specialist in government statistics at Cornell University, told the Guardian: “There are a number of changes to the civil service that make it much easier for the administration to try to interfere with the activities of the statistical agencies and that worries me."

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In a briefing paper urging groups that rely on the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) data to speak out against the proposed rule, she warned that the BLS "leaders could be fired for releasing or planning to release jobs or inflation statistics unfavorable to the president’s policy agenda.”

She further cautioned that “by making it easier to remove employees if a president determines that they are interfering with his or her policies, it increases the potential for passivity or political loyalty to be prioritized over expertise and experience.”

The Guardian report noted that Trump is under pressure to explain shrinking gross domestic product (GDP) figures, which is why "the administration could use new employment rules to pressure workers into 'cooking the books'."

Groshen warns that the credibility of federal data could be at risk in the future, even though she admits there is currently “no evidence” the Trump administration has done so.

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Kitty Richards, a former treasury and White House official under the Biden and Obama administrations, told the Guardian: “We should view attacks on government data collection as hand in glove with attacks on journalism."

“Undermining data collection and casting doubt on data that is released is part of a program of undermining the public’s ability to learn the truth," she added.