President Trump caused a considerable stir in Washington when he fired Commissioner of Labor Statistics Erika McEntarfer back on August 1. The firing came in the wake of a weak jobs report for July, which Trump believes was inaccurate. “We need accurate Jobs Numbers,” he wrote on Truth Social in response to the report. “I have directed my Team to fire this Biden Political Appointee, IMMEDIATELY. She will be replaced with someone much more competent and qualified.”
Trump also said McEntarfer “faked” jobs numbers before the election to try to help Kamala Harris win.
In a follow-up post on August 4, Trump emphasized that it was the significant revisions in the jobs reports—both the ones around the election and the one for July—that made him suspicious. “Those big adjustments were made to cover up, and level out, the FAKE political numbers that were CONCOCTED in order to make a great Republican Success look less stellar,” he wrote.
The list of prominent people denouncing Trump’s move was, naturally, a long one. “Nobody is faking numbers,” said former Labor Department chief of staff Daniel Koh. “Revisions happen all the time.”
Max Stier—the CEO of Partnership for Public Service—said out loud what many observers were undoubtedly thinking. “President Trump is once again destroying the credibility of our government by firing expert and nonpartisan officials because he does not like the facts that they present,” he said. “Governments that go down this path find themselves in ugly territory very quickly.”
David Harsanyi—a senior writer at the Washington Examiner—echoed this sentiment. “This firing smacks of banana republic rule, whatever you make of the precision or revisions of the BLS data,” he wrote.
Trump isn’t wrong to point out that recent BLS data revisions have been larger than normal. But, as Tho Bishop notes, there’s an innocuous explanation for this: lower survey participation rates make it harder to accurately capture the state of the economy in the short term. Trump may suspect that someone is rigging the numbers to make his administration look bad, but seeing as he has presented no good evidence for this, it seems more likely that he is simply following the millennia-long tradition of rulers shooting the messenger rather than facing up to the possibility that they themselves are responsible for the bad news. As the saying goes, history may not repeat, but it often rhymes.
In an ironic though perhaps unsurprising twist, the “much more competent and qualified” replacement that Trump has nominated is being accused of being horrifically unqualified for the job. Trump’s nominee is E.J. Antoni—currently the chief economist at the Heritage Foundation and is known as an ardent Trump supporter. Commenting on the nomination in National Review, economics editor Dominic Pino pulled no punches.
“Antoni is nowhere near qualified to be BLS commissioner,” Pino wrote, after pointing to Antoni’s lack of experience and examples of his poor economic reasoning.
If it was really true that Trump wanted to modernize and improve the BLS, he would have nominated someone with deep experience in economic data collection who has published research on statistical methodology and has ideas about how to make the nuts and bolts of the BLS work better. His nomination of Antoni proves that he wants a lackey instead.
With the Bureau of Labor Statistics generating all this attention, many are taking the opportunity to highlight its perceived shortcomings and ways that it might be reformed and improved. But there is a much more foundational question that we ought to be asking: Should the BLS even exist in the first place?
The Case Against the BLS
To answer this question, we need to go back and understand why the BLS was formed, and more broadly, how government statistics became the mammoth enterprise we know today.
In his 1989 Journal of Libertarian Studies article titled “World War I as Fulfillment: Power and the Intellectuals,” economist Murray Rothbard noted that it was the ideology of the Progressive Era, and specifically the growing desire to have an expert class of intellectuals manage the economy, that first led governments to gather large amounts of statistical data. He calls out economists like Richard T. Ely (1854-1943), Henry Carter Adams (1851-1921), and Wesley Clair Mitchell (1874-1948) as pioneers of this approach. Mitchell, Rothbard notes, was especially explicit about statistics being a tool for government planning. Rothbard quotes Mitchell’s wife, who closely collaborated with him:
…he [Mitchell] envisaged the great contribution that government could make to the understanding of economic and social problems if the statistical data gathered independently by various Federal agencies were systematized and planned so that the interrelationships among them could be studied. The idea of developing social statistics, not merely as a record but as a basis for planning, emerged early in his own work. (emphasis in original)
Rothbard highlights that many government interventions would be completely impossible or at least downright laughable without statistics. How does a government address unemployment if it has no data on employment rates, for example? Hence, Rothbard quotes Samuel B. Ruggles, the American delegate to the International Statistical Congress in Berlin in 1863, who said there that “statistics are the very eyes of the statesman, enabling him to survey and scan with clear and comprehensive vision the whole structure and economy of the body politic.”
It should not be surprising that the Bureau of Labor Statistics was born and raised in this intellectual environment. Established in 1884 as the Bureau of Labor, the agency was shuffled between various government departments for a few decades before finally settling under the newly-created Department of Labor in 1913, where it has remained ever since. The Bureau grew considerably during the 20th century, and it is now the second-largest statistical agency for the US government—after the Census Bureau—with a budget of roughly $700 million and about 2,300 employees. In addition to employment data, the BLS also collects data on inflation, working conditions, and labor productivity, among other things.
Almost three decades before his 1989 paper, Rothbard was already keenly aware of the deep connection between statistics and government planning. In 1960, he published a paper titled “The Politics of Political Economists: Comment”—a reply to a George Stigler paper—pointing out that “the drive for government intervention, and the drive for more statistics, have gone hand in hand.” He developed a similar argument in a 1961 article for The Freeman titled “Statistics: Achilles’ Heel of Government,” where he wrote the following:
Statistics, to repeat, are the eyes and ears of the interventionists: of the intellectual reformer, the politician, and the government bureaucrat. Cut off those eyes and ears, destroy those crucial guidelines to knowledge, and the whole threat of government intervention is almost completely eliminated.
…Thus, in all the host of measures that have been proposed over the years to check and limit government or to repeal its interventions, the simple and unspectacular abolition of government statistics would probably be the most thorough and most effective. Statistics, so vital to statism, its namesake, is also the State’s Achilles’ heel.
Some will no doubt object that abolishing the BLS will deprive policymakers of the vital information required to do their jobs, but that’s exactly the point! We should not want interventionists to have the tools to do their job, because their job consists of getting in the way of competition and economic progress. Paralysis for them means freedom for their subjects and dynamism for the economy.
To be sure, this is not to say that statistics should always be shunned. Some statistics are valuable—and the private sector is more than capable of providing those helpful statistics in accordance with consumer demand. The point is simply that government statistical agencies mainly exist to help interventionists do interventionism. For that reason alone, we ought to be against them.
Not that there is much hope of abolishing them anytime soon, of course. After all, the statists are also fully aware of how central statistics are to their program. Any attack on such a core asset of the enemy is bound to meet fierce resistance.
