Firing the BLS commissioner will come back to haunt Trump
We are both former chairs of the Council of Economic Advisers. In that capacity, our responsibility was to offer the president objective economic advice using the best available data.
We used the data collected by government agencies to understand employment trends; to judge changes in the pace of economic activity; and to gauge whether inflation was under control. At times, the data did not paint the picture the president might have wanted. But we were always confident they were collected using the best available methods and analyzed by a dedicated, nonpartisan staff.
Politicizing those federal statistics and questioning the integrity of those who produce them — as President Donald Trump did last week when he fired the commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics after the monthly employment report came in weaker than expected — is likely to come back to haunt the administration. It compromises the ability of policymakers in the executive branch, Congress and the Federal Reserve to properly analyze the state of the economy and develop the best policies to ensure prosperity.
While no single piece of economic data is dispositive in a leader's decision-making, each must be as accurate as possible to help guide their decisions. Recognizing this need, the federal government has over time created 13 statistical agencies. The BLS is one of the oldest, created in 1884 to collect data on many aspects of the economy, including the monthly employment report and retail and wholesale prices. Today, government and business leaders throughout the economy rely on this information to make sound decisions. These statistics shed light on the state of the labor market, trends and opportunities in business investment, and the size and health of our population.
The collection and analysis of federal statistics is complex. Often, the first numbers produced are revised as more information is gathered. And sometimes the revisions are quite large. This can lead to questions about the process, so it is crucial that the users of the data (which is really all of us!) trust that those collecting and analyzing these statistics are not swayed by politics. After all, if data are only considered 'good' when they support a particular politician's worldview and 'bad' when they do not, why should anyone believe them? And if we don't believe them, we know less about what is happening in the economy.
Economists such as Nicholas Bloom at Stanford University have documented that uncertainty about economic prospects and policy reduces economic growth. Further, Nobel Prize winners Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson and James Robinson have identified the strength of a nation's institutions as a source of economic growth. We have little doubt that part of the success of the U.S. economy over the past century is due to its strong and independent federal statistical agencies, which generate the kind of information leaders need to make smart decisions.
Federal statistics may seem like an arcane topic that interests only econ wonks like us. But the truth is that these statistical agencies have made it possible for business leaders and policymakers alike to analyze credible data and plan for the future. And that is something everyone should care about.
Politicians spin — it is what they do. But when their spin undermines the integrity of the numbers we have come to rely on, the consequences are real. We will all pay the price.
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16 minutes ago
Harvard scientists say research could be set back years after funding freeze
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- Harvard University professor Alberto Ascherio's research is literally frozen. Collected from millions of U.S. soldiers over two decades using millions of dollars from taxpayers, the epidemiology and nutrition scientist has blood samples stored in liquid nitrogen freezers within the university's T.H. Chan School of Public Health. The samples are key to his award-winning research, which seeks a cure to multiple sclerosis and other neurodegenerative diseases. But for months, Ascherio has been unable to work with the samples because he lost $7 million in federal research funding, a casualty of Harvard's fight with the Trump administration. 'It's like we have been creating a state-of-the-art telescope to explore the universe, and now we don't have money to launch it,' said Ascherio. 'We built everything and now we are ready to use it to make a new discovery that could impact millions of people in the world and then, 'Poof. You're being cut off.'' The loss of an estimated $2.6 billion in federal funding at Harvard has meant that some of the world's most prominent researchers are laying off young researchers. They are shelving years or even decades of research, into everything from opioid addiction to cancer. And despite Harvard's lawsuits against the administration, and settlement talks between the warring parties, researchers are confronting the fact that some of their work may never resume. The funding cuts are part of a monthslong battle that the Trump administration has waged against some the country's top universities including Columbia, Brown and Northwestern. The administration has taken a particularly aggressive stance against Harvard, freezing funding after the country's oldest university rejected a series of government demands issued by a federal antisemitism task force. The government had demanded sweeping changes at Harvard related to campus protests, academics and admissions — meant to address government accusations that the university had become a hotbed of liberalism and tolerated anti-Jewish harassment. Harvard responded by filing a federal lawsuit, accusing the Trump administration of waging a retaliation campaign against the university. In the lawsuit, it laid out reforms it had taken to address antisemitism but also vowed not to 'surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights.' 'Make no mistake: Harvard rejects antisemitism and discrimination in all of its forms and is actively making structural reforms to eradicate antisemitism on campus," the university said in its legal complaint. 'But rather than engage with Harvard regarding those ongoing efforts, the Government announced a sweeping freeze of funding for medical, scientific, technological, and other research that has nothing at all to do with antisemitism.' The Trump administration denies the cuts were made in retaliation, saying the grants were under review even before the demands were sent in April. It argues the government has wide discretion to cancel federal contracts for policy reasons. The funding cuts have left Harvard's research community in a state of shock, feeling as if they are being unfairly targeted in a fight has nothing to do with them. Some have been forced to shutter labs or scramble to find non-government funding to replace lost money. In May, Harvard announced that it would put up at least $250 million of its own money to continue research efforts, but university President Alan Garber warned of 'difficult decisions and sacrifices' ahead. Ascherio said the university was able to pull together funding to pay his researchers' salaries until next June. But he's still been left without resources needed to fund critical research tasks, like lab work. Even a year's delay can put his research back five years, he said. 'It's really devastating,' agreed Rita Hamad, the director of the Social Policies for Health Equity Research Center at Harvard, who had three multiyear grants totaling $10 million canceled by the Trump administration. The grants funded research into the impact of school segregation on heart health, how pandemic-era policies in over 250 counties affected mental health, and the role of neighborhood factors in dementia. At the School of Public Health, where Hamad is based, 190 grants have been terminated, affecting roughly 130 scientists. 'Just thinking about all the knowledge that's not going to be gained or that is going to be actively lost," Hamad said. She expects significant layoffs on her team if the funding freeze continues for a few more months. "It's all just a mixture of frustration and anger and sadness all the time, every day." John Quackenbush, a professor of computational biology and bioinformatics at the School of Public Health, has spent the past few months enduring cuts on multiple fronts. In April, a multimillion dollar grant was not renewed, jeopardizing a study into the role sex plays in disease. In May, he lost about $1.2 million in federal funding for in the coming year due to the Harvard freeze. Four departmental grants worth $24 million that funded training of doctoral students also were cancelled as part of the fight with the Trump administration, Quackenbush said. 'I'm in a position where I have to really think about, 'Can I revive this research?'' he said. 'Can I restart these programs even if Harvard and the Trump administration reached some kind of settlement? If they do reach a settlement, how quickly can the funding be turned back on? Can it be turned back on?' The researchers all agreed that the funding cuts have little or nothing to do with the university's fight against antisemitism. Some, however, argue changes at Harvard were long overdue and pressure from the Trump administration was necessary. Bertha Madras, a Harvard psychobiologist who lost funding to create a free, parent-focused training to prevent teen opioid overdose and drug use, said she's happy to see the culling of what she called 'politically motivated social science studies.' Madras said pressure from the White House has catalyzed much-needed reform at the university, where several programs of study have 'really gone off the wall in terms of being shaped by orthodoxy that is not representative of the country as a whole.' But Madras, who served on the President's Commission on Opioids during Trump's first term, said holding scientists' research funding hostage as a bargaining chip doesn't make sense. 'I don't know if reform would have happened without the president of the United States pointing the bony finger at Harvard," she said. 'But sacrificing science is problematic, and it's very worrisome because it is one of the major pillars of strength of the country.' Quackenbush and other Harvard researchers argue the cuts are part of a larger attack on science by the Trump administration that puts the country's reputation as the global research leader at risk. Support for students and post-doctoral fellows has been slashed, visas for foreign scholars threatened, and new guidelines and funding cuts at the NIH will make it much more difficult to get federal funding in the future, they said. It also will be difficult to replace federal funding with money from the private sector. 'We're all sort of moving toward this future in which this 80-year partnership between the government and the universities is going to be jeopardized,' Quackenbush said. 'We're going to face real challenges in continuing to lead the world in scientific excellence.'
CNN
2 hours ago
- CNN
Analysis: Trump may be forging progress in Ukraine or walking into Putin's trap
Donald Trump proclaimed 'great progress' toward ending the Ukraine war after announcing plans to meet soon with Russian President Vladimir Putin. But is Putin, to quote the US president in a previous, and rare, moment of lucidity on Russian relations, merely 'tapping (him) along' again? Trump's boiling frustration with Putin, who has tarnished the president's hopes of becoming a peacemaker worthy of the Nobel Prize, evaporated after his envoy Steve Witkoff emerged from a three-hour meeting Wednesday with the Kremlin strongman. Trump predicted that a summit within weeks could stop the war in Ukraine, saying there was a 'very good chance that we could be ending … the end of that road.' His bullishness was more in character than his stance over the past few weeks, when he's lambasted Putin's 'disgusting' air strikes on Kyiv and called the world leader he's always tried to impress the most 'absolutely crazy.' He cautioned Wednesday that there hadn't been a 'breakthrough' in Moscow. But he still seemed impossibly optimistic in light of Russia's recent drone and missile blitzes on Ukraine — some of the most intense yet — and the absence of any evidence over three years of combat that Putin has any intention of ending the horrific war. Trump has repeatedly claimed great progress is imminent since taking office in January — after promising and then failing to end the war in 24 hours. But Putin's reasons for continuing the war are far more compelling than any incentive Trump can give him to end it. 'I think we in Washington sometimes underestimate just how invested the Kremlin is in waging this war,' said David Salvo, a Russia expert and managing director of the Alliance for Securing Democracy at the German Marshall Fund. 'The legitimacy and the fate of the entire Putin regime is based on not just concluding this war on Russian terms but continuing to fight it for the foreseeable future, the entire economy is propped up around the war.' Salvo, a former State Department official, added, 'I just don't see anything that's going to move the needle and change the calculus of the Kremlin.' Still, successful peacemaking often requires presidents to take risks. And if Trump somehow did manage to initiate a genuine peace process, he'd save potentially thousands of lives in a war that has devastated Ukrainian civilians. He'd also achieve a major milestone for the US and himself. So is there any reason for optimism? A Putin summit would be a grand moment of statesmanship and offer Trump a long-hoped-for one-on-one with the Russian leader and the chance to test his belief that, in person, he can use his dealmaking skills to end the war. Trump is also proposing a trilateral meeting that would bring together Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in the most significant diplomatic encounter since the illegal Russian invasion three years ago. Russian has not yet publicly confirmed either of the summits. Moscow typically prepares for such meetings with painstaking lower-level talks, which it often uses as delaying tactics, so it might bristle at the rush. But the raised stakes of a presidential meeting could put pressure on Putin to deliver at least something Trump can call a win. This might include a deal to halt air attacks on civilians, even if a full ceasefire and peace deal could take many months to clinch. But Russian ceasefire pledges are often not worth the paper they are written on. Significant progress would also validate Trump's new strategy of trying to coerce Putin to the table with punishments rather than flattery. It may be no coincidence that apparent movement in the war came on a day when Trump said he'd slap heavy tariffs on India — one of the top buyers of the Russian oil that bankrolls the war effort. In two days, Trump faces his own deadline to also impose new sanctions on Russia over its snub to his ceasefire demands. There was a rare note of optimism in Ukraine on Wednesday. 'Russia now seems to be more inclined toward a ceasefire — the pressure is working,' Zelensky said in his nightly wartime address. Putin may still be playing the same old game. In the first seven months of Trump's second term, he's been humiliated by Putin ignoring his peace efforts and making a mockery of Trump's claims that the Russian leader sincerely wants peace. Even Trump, who has a long history of genuflecting to the Russian leader, seems to have realized he was taken for a fool. But Putin could be stringing Trump along again after meeting Witkoff, who left previous Kremlin meetings amplifying Russian talking points and whose record is threadbare to date on peacemaking in the Middle East and Ukraine is threadbare. The president admitted he doesn't know what Putin's game is. 'I can't answer that question yet,' he told reporters on Wednesday. 'I'll tell you in a matter of weeks, maybe less.' Trump might try to bill any Putin summit as a win on its own. But he'd be granting Putin a prize without securing a price. The ex-KGB lieutenant colonel in the Kremlin may be banking on Trump's love of theatrical photo-ops that often don't yield much. His first-term summits with tyrant Kim Jong Un, for example, failed to end North Korea's nuclear program. Putin has long said he's willing to meet Trump when the moment is right, and such a meeting — which would evoke echoes of famous US-Soviet Cold War summits — would represent a reentry by a pariah leader on the world's top diplomatic stage. And any meeting would rekindle memories of the Helsinki summit in Trump's first term, when Putin was stunningly successful in manipulating his US counterpart. 'I think Putin will see it as an opportunity,' former Trump national security adviser John Bolton told CNN's Kaitlan Collins on 'The Source' Wednesday. 'I think he knows he's, deliberately or inadvertently, pushed Trump a little too far, and he will have some ideas about how to bring things back in his direction,' Bolton said. The crunch question is what the Russians would offer as a summit deliverable. The US tried in the past for an agreement to halt air attacks by both sides. This might allow Ukrainians to leave their air raid shelters. But chances of a broader ceasefire seem remote. Major breakthroughs seem likely in Moscow's summer offensive. So why stop fighting now? Putin may see this new engagement with Trump as buying more time to bite off key strategic land in eastern Ukraine. Another potential approach would be for Russia to coax Trump with inducements to take his eye off Ukraine — perhaps a promise for talks on a nuclear arms control agreement that would boost his legacy, or some significant economic cooperation that would conjure Trump's transactional instincts. Ukraine must also be heard, and it will be wary of Trump returning to a pro-Russian peace plan that would have met Moscow's demands to retain all territory it has seized in Ukraine, as well as for NATO membership for Kyiv to be definitively ruled out. Moscow has long tried to play on Trump's skepticism about the war by encouraging splits between the US and Kyiv's European allies. So it was significant that European leaders were on a call with Trump and Zelensky on Wednesday. President Ronald Reagan's Cold War maxim about dealing with Moscow — 'Trust but verify' — seems quaint given Putin's record of duplicity over the war. Zelensky on Wednesday had a more apt forewarning: 'The key is to ensure they don't deceive anyone in the details — neither us nor the United States.'
San Francisco Chronicle
2 hours ago
- San Francisco Chronicle
Harvard scientists say research could be set back years after funding freeze
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. (AP) — Harvard University professor Alberto Ascherio's research is literally frozen. Collected from millions of U.S. soldiers over two decades using millions of dollars from taxpayers, the epidemiology and nutrition scientist has blood samples stored in liquid nitrogen freezers within the university's T.H. Chan School of Public Health. The samples are key to his award-winning research, which seeks a cure to multiple sclerosis and other neurodegenerative diseases. But for months, Ascherio has been unable to work with the samples because he lost $7 million in federal research funding, a casualty of Harvard's fight with the Trump administration. 'It's like we have been creating a state-of-the-art telescope to explore the universe, and now we don't have money to launch it,' said Ascherio. 'We built everything and now we are ready to use it to make a new discovery that could impact millions of people in the world and then, 'Poof. You're being cut off.'' Researchers laid off and science shelved The loss of an estimated $2.6 billion in federal funding at Harvard has meant that some of the world's most prominent researchers are laying off young researchers. They are shelving years or even decades of research, into everything from opioid addiction to cancer. And despite Harvard's lawsuits against the administration, and settlement talks between the warring parties, researchers are confronting the fact that some of their work may never resume. The funding cuts are part of a monthslong battle that the Trump administration has waged against some the country's top universities including Columbia, Brown and Northwestern. The administration has taken a particularly aggressive stance against Harvard, freezing funding after the country's oldest university rejected a series of government demands issued by a federal antisemitism task force. The government had demanded sweeping changes at Harvard related to campus protests, academics and admissions — meant to address government accusations that the university had become a hotbed of liberalism and tolerated anti-Jewish harassment. Research jeopardized, even if court case prevails Harvard responded by filing a federal lawsuit, accusing the Trump administration of waging a retaliation campaign against the university. In the lawsuit, it laid out reforms it had taken to address antisemitism but also vowed not to 'surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights.' 'Make no mistake: Harvard rejects antisemitism and discrimination in all of its forms and is actively making structural reforms to eradicate antisemitism on campus," the university said in its legal complaint. 'But rather than engage with Harvard regarding those ongoing efforts, the Government announced a sweeping freeze of funding for medical, scientific, technological, and other research that has nothing at all to do with antisemitism.' The Trump administration denies the cuts were made in retaliation, saying the grants were under review even before the demands were sent in April. It argues the government has wide discretion to cancel federal contracts for policy reasons. The funding cuts have left Harvard's research community in a state of shock, feeling as if they are being unfairly targeted in a fight has nothing to do with them. Some have been forced to shutter labs or scramble to find non-government funding to replace lost money. In May, Harvard announced that it would put up at least $250 million of its own money to continue research efforts, but university President Alan Garber warned of 'difficult decisions and sacrifices' ahead. Ascherio said the university was able to pull together funding to pay his researchers' salaries until next June. But he's still been left without resources needed to fund critical research tasks, like lab work. Even a year's delay can put his research back five years, he said. Knowledge lost in funding freeze 'It's really devastating,' agreed Rita Hamad, the director of the Social Policies for Health Equity Research Center at Harvard, who had three multiyear grants totaling $10 million canceled by the Trump administration. The grants funded research into the impact of school segregation on heart health, how pandemic-era policies in over 250 counties affected mental health, and the role of neighborhood factors in dementia. At the School of Public Health, where Hamad is based, 190 grants have been terminated, affecting roughly 130 scientists. 'Just thinking about all the knowledge that's not going to be gained or that is going to be actively lost," Hamad said. She expects significant layoffs on her team if the funding freeze continues for a few more months. "It's all just a mixture of frustration and anger and sadness all the time, every day." John Quackenbush, a professor of computational biology and bioinformatics at the School of Public Health, has spent the past few months enduring cuts on multiple fronts. In April, a multimillion dollar grant was not renewed, jeopardizing a study into the role sex plays in disease. In May, he lost about $1.2 million in federal funding for in the coming year due to the Harvard freeze. Four departmental grants worth $24 million that funded training of doctoral students also were cancelled as part of the fight with the Trump administration, Quackenbush said. 'I'm in a position where I have to really think about, 'Can I revive this research?'' he said. 'Can I restart these programs even if Harvard and the Trump administration reached some kind of settlement? If they do reach a settlement, how quickly can the funding be turned back on? Can it be turned back on?' The researchers all agreed that the funding cuts have little or nothing to do with the university's fight against antisemitism. Some, however, argue changes at Harvard were long overdue and pressure from the Trump administration was necessary. Bertha Madras, a Harvard psychobiologist who lost funding to create a free, parent-focused training to prevent teen opioid overdose and drug use, said she's happy to see the culling of what she called 'politically motivated social science studies.' White House pressure a good thing? Madras said pressure from the White House has catalyzed much-needed reform at the university, where several programs of study have 'really gone off the wall in terms of being shaped by orthodoxy that is not representative of the country as a whole.' But Madras, who served on the President's Commission on Opioids during Trump's first term, said holding scientists' research funding hostage as a bargaining chip doesn't make sense. 'I don't know if reform would have happened without the president of the United States pointing the bony finger at Harvard," she said. 'But sacrificing science is problematic, and it's very worrisome because it is one of the major pillars of strength of the country.' Quackenbush and other Harvard researchers argue the cuts are part of a larger attack on science by the Trump administration that puts the country's reputation as the global research leader at risk. Support for students and post-doctoral fellows has been slashed, visas for foreign scholars threatened, and new guidelines and funding cuts at the NIH will make it much more difficult to get federal funding in the future, they said. It also will be difficult to replace federal funding with money from the private sector. 'We're all sort of moving toward this future in which this 80-year partnership between the government and the universities is going to be jeopardized,' Quackenbush said. 'We're going to face real challenges in continuing to lead the world in scientific excellence.'
