This news piece discusses the impact of the Trump administration's recent actions to take down and limit access to government data, particularly focusing on the upcoming January jobs report. The article highlights the crucial role of government data in informing economic decisions and the potential consequences of its inaccessibility for businesses, policymakers, and the general public.
On Friday, at 8:29 a.m., markets across the world will slow what they’re doing to wait for data—specifically, the monthly jobs report , which the Bureau of Labor Statistics releases at 8:30 a.m. It’s not an exaggeration to say that trillions of dollars (U.S. equity markets alone are worth $62 trillion) turn on what the BLS says. The stock market, bond market, and Federal Reserve act and react based on this report.
But Friday’s release, which covers the month of January, also has the unfortunate distinction of relying in part on government data that was taken offline this week and is, as of this writing, inaccessible to the public. Economists, business owners, and even everyday people are entitled to understand the full picture of who lives and works in this country, and the Trump administration just made that harder. Allow me to wonk out for a moment here. The report is technically called the Employment Situation, and it’s a monthly picture of who was hired, who was fired, what race and gender they are, which sectors they work in, what education they completed, even whether they could find only part-time work that month. The BLS collects data in two ways: from employers and from households. And once a year,based on a bunch of different factors (I’m grossly simplifying), including details on the U.S. population according to census data. That is the report we’re expecting Friday—a 30,000-foot view of the American population and labor force over the year. And this week, census.gov went offline, to try to comply with the Trump administration’s executive orders on government statistics is a precious commodity. “When we think about general public trust in government data, anything that happens at one statistical agency affects trust in the whole system,” Jed Kolko, who served in the Biden administration as the Commerce Department’s undersecretary for economic affairs, told me. “It’s not just about a trust halo effect across the agencies. It’s also that agencies often use each other’s data as input for their own statistics.”That brings us back to the jobs report. To be clear, there is no evidence that any data at BLS have been deleted or changed—to do so would incite panic in the markets, something Trump doesn’t want to do. The BLS is housed in the Department of Labor. The Census Bureau is part of the Department of Commerce. They share! Across the government’s, it’s data sharing all the way down. All sorts of disparate issues, including immigration, job training, congressional redistricting, public health, and anti-poverty aid (to name just a few), depend on correct and careful data collection—and the sharing of that data with the public.This is part of the reason it has been so frightening to watch the Trump administration delete, alter, and disappear federal data over the past two weeks. Since Jan. 20, data on, and more have been taken down, disappeared, then reappeared or severely limited. According to Wired’s excellent analysis, more than Scientists, doctors, and public health researchers have loudly campaigned to restore the data, and some have come back online. But certainly not all. In her, epidemiologist Katelyn Jetelina writes that public health data and communication are “as valuable as gold, for protecting American lives.” She notes that incomplete and inaccurate data can be dangerous. American health and even national security rely on understanding. “Their power lies in their purity: reliability, accuracy, and accessibility,” she wrote. “The longer this instability and information drip-feed continues, the greater the biosecurity risk.” Imagine you’re a doctor or nurse and want to understand how to stop mpox transmission in your community. What’s the current vaccine guidance? The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention should be able to tell you that, but right now, all this. That the data bureaucracy is too big and unwieldy. And that private information—collected by companies like ADP, which processes payrolls—can fill the gap. Government data is certainly not perfect, true. But the private sector relies heavily on government information. Economists Ellen Hughes-Cromwick and Julia Coronado published in the Journal of Economic Perspectives showing how a vast range of companies depend on U.S. government data to understand their customers and make decisions about how to run their businesses.Let’s say that you run, oh, I don’t know, an electric car company. According to Hughes-Cromwick and Coronado’s work, you might use government reports on auto sales (the Bureau of Economic Analysis), consumer credit (the Fed), the consumer price index for new vehicles (BLS), the consumer price index for all items (BLS), disposable personal income (BEA), employment and unemployment (BLS), energy prices (BLS and the Energy Information Administration), the GDP (BEA), interest rates (the Fed), inventories (the census), regional income, prices, and consumer spending (BEA and the census)
DATA SHARING GOVERNMENT STATISTICS TRUMP ADMINISTRATION JOBS REPORT ECONOMIC ANALYSIS PUBLIC HEALTH FEDERAL DATA
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