Catherine Rampell: First thing we do, let’s fire all the statisticians

There’s more than one way to cook the books. You can doctor or delete data after it’s been collected. Alternatively, you can ensure the numbers are never collected in the first place.

Lately, the Trump administration has been into leaning into that second scheme, by purging and defunding statistics agencies.

For months, President Donald Trump has waged war on objective, reliable federal statistics. By “statistics,” I mean the bits of information, large and small, that Americans might take for granted but need to make sense of the world. These figures help families decide where to live, physicians how to treat their patients, and businesses what to sell or whether to hire. But increasingly, the administration has delayed, redacted or canceled statistical releases when results proved inconvenient.

For example, the Agriculture Department produces a quarterly report estimating trends in international trade in farm-related goods. The most recent forecast projected an increase in the U.S. trade deficit in farm goods later this year, related to Trump’s tariffs and anti-American sentiments abroad. This would, of course, contradict Trump’s trade rhetoric, so the report was delayed and ultimately released without the detailed explanatory analysis it usually contains. (For example, a reference to how anti-American backlash in Canada has affected exports was excised.)

This seemingly low-profile change might represent a turning point of sorts. Until recently, the administration had largely left economic data untouched. After all, unlike data on substance abuse or children’s literacy, real-time economic numbers can move markets. Traders might freak out if they suspect the data is unreliable, and Trump’s economic advisers know this.

But if those concerns had deterred administration officials from fudging the numbers before, their hesitation now appears to be waning. Market analysts and economists are now openly worrying about the integrity of other once rock-solid federal economic data.

To be clear, administration officials do not appear to be overtly massaging numbers to reach their preferred conclusions – or “beating the data until it confesses,” as the saying goes. More often, officials are depriving agencies of resources necessary to crunch the numbers in the first place. Early retirements, “deferred resignation” offers, hiring freezes and haphazard budget cuts have made it difficult for our gold-standard statistical agencies to complete some of their core responsibilities, including some required by federal law.

The Bureau of Economic Analysis, which publishes major macroeconomic statistics such as gross domestic product, has lost about 20% of its employees since the beginning of the year, according to a source familiar with the internal numbers. (The BEA’s press office, like most agency press offices I contacted, declined to confirm these numbers, instead referring me to the president’s fiscal 2026 budget request. That does, incidentally, reflect a 20% decline from last year’s staffing levels.)

Citing “resource constraints” and “ongoing modernization and streamlining of news release packages,” the agency has announced it will stop publishing certain data, including detailed numbers on foreign direct investment in the United States as well as U.S. investment abroad.

These seem like important things to track given Trump’s dubious claims about how he’s made America a more desirable place for foreigners to invest their money. Of course, it’s easier for the president to make such fact-free declarations if no objective data is available to refute him.

Other agencies are suffering similar brain drains. The Census Bureau, for instance, lost more than 1,000 employees as of April, the acting director said.

Staff shortages have likewise been so severe at the Bureau of Labor Statistics that it has had to cut back on some of its most important, market-moving data collection. Last month, the agency announced it had stopped collecting all consumer price data in Lincoln, Nebraska; Provo, Utah; and Buffalo. This followed an earlier announcement about halting the publication of hundreds of producer price series nationwide. (I have asked Labor Department press officials for staffing levels at least a dozen times over the past month. Each time, I’ve been punted to someone else or told the department needs more time to answer the question. Apparently, disappearing data applies to the government’s own payroll records, too.)

Meanwhile, Trump has asked Congress to more permanently slash spending at the BLS, which also publishes marquee reports on unemployment and jobs. Elsewhere across the government, he announced plans to scale back the survey used to measure use of food stamps and other government benefits – and has [beg ital]already[end ital] fired everyone in the office that calculates the poverty guidelines, which are used to determine eligibility for those same benefit programs.

Perhaps most worryingly, Trump is (again) eyeing the decennial census. This is the country’s oldest statistical measure, which happens to be constitutionally mandated. But Trump, aided by GOP allies such as Sen. Bill Hagerty (Tennessee) and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (Georgia), is now trying to exclude all noncitizens from the official count.

This would violate the 14th Amendment, which requires counting “the whole number of persons.” It would, however, relieve the MAGA movement of the inconvenience of enumerating people it doesn’t think should be counted in the first place.

Because hey, if you don’t count something, perhaps it ceases to exist.