How Trump is reshaping government data

NBC News

9 hours ago

Meteorological data collected by some weather balloons has been halted. Statistics for HIV among transgender people were scrubbed from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's website. And basic public figures, like how many people work for the federal government, have been frozen or delayed for months.
Across the federal government, President Donald Trump has been wielding his influence over data used by researchers, economists and scientists, an effort that was playing out largely behind the scenes until Friday, when he fired the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
The agency collects and publishes economic data, and Trump accused its former chief, Erika McEntarfer, of giving fake employment data last week showing a recent slowdown in the labor market.
"The numbers were rigged. Biden wasn't doing well, he was doing poorly," Trump said in an interview on CNBC Tuesday, referring to the jobs numbers.
Presidents of both political parties often seek to spin government data to their benefit, cherry-picking numbers that put their agendas in the best light possible. But McEntarfer's firing has drawn criticism from economists, Wall Street investors and even Republicans who are raising wider concerns about the continued reliability of government data once seen as the gold standard.
'We have to look somewhere for objective statistics. When the people providing the statistics are fired, it makes it much harder to make judgments that, you know, the statistics won't be politicized,' Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., said in an interview. 'You can't really make the numbers different or better by firing the people doing the counting.'
William Beach, whom Trump nominated for BLS commissioner in the last half of his first term, said in an interview with NBC News that the commissioner has no control over the results of the jobs report, which is compiled by a group of economists and statisticians. The commissioner doesn't see the data until it is locked into the system several days before its release, Beach said.
"It's not currently possible for the commissioner to rig the data," he said.
Trump has a history of seeking to distort hard numbers. In 2019, during his first term, he showed off a doctored hurricane model that included a Sharpie-like black swipe that made Alabama seem to be in Hurricane Dorian's path — when it wasn't. As the Covid-19 pandemic raged, Trump bemoaned how testing made the United States look as though it had more cases than other countries.
'Think of this: If we didn't do testing, instead of testing over 40 million people, if we did half the testing, we would have half the cases,' he said at a news conference at the White House. 'If we did another, you cut that in half; we would have, yet again, half of that. But the headlines are always 'testing.''
And the final days of his first term in office were spent refusing to accept the results of the 2020 presidential election, claiming falsely that there had been widespread voter fraud in his loss to Democrat Joe Biden.
In his second term, the administration's efforts to target or control government data appear to be growing.
After buyouts and staffing cuts, the National Weather Service stopped some of its weather balloon releases beginning in February, a measure that independent meteorologists say has left data gaps that have degraded forecasts.
This spring, the National Centers for Environmental Information announced it would no longer track billion-dollar weather and climate disasters, something it had done since 1980.
The administration also shuttered the National Climate Assessment's website in July after it told hundreds of volunteer scientists who were working on its 2027 report that it no longer needed them and ended funding for the U.S. Global Change Research Program, which had coordinated work on the federal report.
The White House denied any effort to control data.
'President Trump is leading the most transparent administration in history,' said White House spokesman Kush Desai. 'Not only has the administration continued to share the data that's critical for policymakers, businesses, researchers, and everyday Americans, but we have taken historic steps to improve the reliability and accuracy of that data by re-examining how it's collected and distributed.'
The White House said the NWS never lost confidence in weather model accuracy, and that the agency is looking at ways to improve the efficiency of weather balloon data collection and new satellite technology to improve forecasting models. The NWS continues to launch weather balloons daily, it said.
In the CNBC interview Tuesday, Trump contradicted some data put out by his own government. He said that prices were falling — despite numbers released by the BLS last week showing inflation picking up in June. He said a gallon of gas was down to $2.20; the average price for a gallon of gas is $3.14, slightly up since when Trump entered office though lower than it was at this time a year ago, according to Energy Department data.
Trump provided no evidence Friday that any data had been rigged when he fired McEntarfer hours after a government report showed that hiring had slowed significantly, making a revision to the number of jobs added over the previous two months. It isn't uncommon for the agency to revise numbers downward, but the revision last week was the largest since the start of the pandemic.
At the same time, the Bureau of Labor Statistics has cut back on some data collection because of staffing issues. The agency has twice reduced the sample collection areas across the country for the monthly inflation report, suspending data collection entirely in Lincoln, Nebraska, and Provo, Utah. In July, it suspended data collection by roughly 15% across the 72 other areas. The reasoning was to 'align survey workload with resource levels.'
The White House attributed these changes to the recently fired commissioner and said the Department of Labor only learned of these changes in the press. The Department of Labor, which oversees BLS, has been working to address staffing and other issues affecting data collection, it said.
Economic officials in past administrations of both political parties have said improvements in government collection of data are needed because of budget cuts and falling response rates to government surveys. But they said there are no indications the BLS commissioner could be involved in changing the numbers for political purposes.
Stephen Moore, a former Trump campaign adviser on economic issues, agreed with Trump's decision to replace McEntarfer and said he hopes a new leader could improve the accuracy of employment data. 'There's no doubt that since Covid, the job numbers have become more and more imprecise,' he said, citing a drop-off in survey response rates by the public and employers.
But he doubted whether the poor job numbers were politically motivated — something Trump and his top economic adviser have alleged.
'It might be true, but there's no real evidence of that,' Moore said.
The deputy commissioner of BLS, Bill Wiatrowski, who took up the role during the Obama administration, will become the acting chief while Trump looks for a replacement, who will have to be confirmed by the Senate.
Other types of federal data haven't been updated for months. Immigration and Customs Enforcement used to provide a data dashboard of arrests, detentions and deportations, but it hasn't updated it since December.
The White House said the Department of Homeland Security has been regularly putting out information on immigration enforcement actions by press release, in media appearances by top officials and on social media.
A dataset that tracks how many people work for the federal government, broken down by gender, age and average salary, had been updated quarterly for decades until January, when it froze for months, making it difficult to understand how many people work in the federal government and what the impact of cuts by the Department of Government Efficiency have been. The first-quarter data was eventually published last month, four months late.
Across public health agencies, the administration has been removing data, limiting data collection and sometimes issuing guidance that contradicts their own data — affecting not just government decision-making but also the ability for outside medical researchers, public health departments and doctors to give the best advice to patients and the public.
'The consequences from a health perspective to the loss of data will be severe,' said Richard Besser, former acting director of the CDC and current president of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, a nonprofit health foundation. 'If you can't trust the CDC's website, where can people go for that critical health information? That's the key question, and unfortunately, I don't have a good answer. And that worries me greatly.'
The CDC scrubbed a swath of HIV-related content from its website in January to comply with Trump's executive orders on diversity, equity and inclusion, while continuing to put out total HIV statistics. It also temporarily withheld two weekly reports on bird flu that had been scheduled to be published Jan. 23 though the data was eventually released.
In April, Reuters reported that, because of staffing cuts, the Consumer Product Safety Commission would stop collecting data via the National Electronic Injury Surveillance System about injuries from motor vehicle crashes, falls, alcohol, adverse drug effects, aircraft incidents and work-related incidents.
Trump's embrace of government data can depend on which way it's trending. Several months ago, he was quick to herald the labor statistics when they were more favorable.
'GREAT JOB NUMBERS, FAR BETTER THAN EXPECTED. IT'S ALREADY WORKING. HANG TOUGH, WE CAN'T LOSE!!!' he wrote on social media when the number of jobs added in March exceeded expectations.