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covid-19
Trump’s Firing of the BLS Commissioner Is Part of a Larger Attack on Government Data
An alarming approach is emerging on job creation, economic growth, and tax collections: If reality doesn’t conform to the narrative, destroy the evidence.
Aug 07, 2025
Last week, U.S. President Donald Trump fired the commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, or BLS, in retaliation for publishing weak jobs numbers in the bureau’s monthly employment report. The Trump administration rightly received criticism for spooking investors and undermining the creditability of government data for this reckless move. But this is just the latest act in a broader erosion of the federal data infrastructure.
President Trump provided zero evidence to support his claim of a “rigged” report created to make him look bad. Janet Yellen, the former Treasury secretary and chair of the Federal Reserve, described the firing as “the kind of thing you would only expect to see in a banana republic.”
It’s crucial to understand the BLS is an independent, non-partisan, and highly respected agency tasked with producing data on jobs, wages, and prices. This data serves as the backbone for a broad swath of public and private decision-making. Researchers depend on these data to study the impacts of government decision-making on the economy, budgets, and people’s lives.
Trump’s latest attack on the BLS contributes to an alarming trend. For years, federal statistical agencies have been chronically underfunded. Under the Trump administration, additional budget cuts, federal hiring freezes, and mass layoffs are further straining agencies.
Distrust in data will harm every American, leaving businesses less able to prepare for a recession, labor unions less equipped for potential layoffs, families less able to predict how far their paycheck will go.
The collection of quality data is often labor-intensive, sometimes requiring massive field operations. When agency funding and staff levels cannot support the full collection effort, we risk losing the kind of data that is the hardest, and most essential, to collect: data in rural areas, smaller geographies, and often historically undercounted populations. This kind of slow data erasure poses serious challenges for tax policy research and modeling.
For example, the Census Bureau employs thousands of field representatives to interview households and businesses for a range of surveys. But since January, 1,300 Census Bureau employees have reportedly left, further hamstringing data collection in an already understaffed agency. Previously, when the agency faced funding shortfalls in 2016, it cancelled its field testing aimed at improving counts in Spanish-speaking areas and on Indigenous reservations for the 2020 Census. These hard-to-count communities are often central to our analyses of tax equity.
BLS faces similar challenges. Inflation data relies on data collectors to record price data from thousands of retailers across the country. These operations are being forced to scale back due to shrinking resources and in some cases have stopped altogether. Despite this, Trump’s 2026 budget proposal reduces the BLS budget by $56 million and proposes a major restructuring of the agency. This data is foundational to many aspects of modeling; it allows us to compare the impact of policy over time in “real” terms and project policy impacts out into the future.
At the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), staffing levels in the Research, Applied Analytics, and Statistics office have decreased by 29% since January. As a result, the IRS has indefinitely postponed its Joint Statistical Research Program, which produced original research and novel data sets that the Institution on Taxation and Economic Policy frequently relies on to inform our own modeling of tax policy and taxpayer behavior.
Distrust in data will harm every American, leaving businesses less able to prepare for a recession, labor unions less equipped for potential layoffs, families less able to predict how far their paycheck will go. At the height of Covid-19 deaths in June 2020, Trump famously said, “if we stop testing right now, we’d have very few cases if any.” A similar approach is emerging on job creation, economic growth, and tax collections: If reality doesn’t conform to the narrative, destroy the evidence.
The federal government’s statistical agencies are full of nonpartisan career economists and statisticians who work hard to be responsible stewards of our nation’s data. And they continue to do so even under tight resource constraints and amid a fiercely partisan political environment. But last week’s attacks on BLS fuel growing fears among researchers and policy analysts that the data we rely on to understand policy may one day be compromised, suppressed, or deleted altogether.
It’s crucial to understand the BLS is an independent, non-partisan, and highly respected agency tasked with producing data on jobs, wages, and prices. This data serves as the backbone for a broad swath of public and private decision-making. Researchers depend on these data to study the impacts of government decision-making on the economy, budgets, and people’s lives.
Trump’s latest attack on the BLS contributes to an alarming trend. For years, federal statistical agencies have been chronically underfunded. Under the Trump administration, additional budget cuts, federal hiring freezes, and mass layoffs are further straining agencies.
Distrust in data will harm every American, leaving businesses less able to prepare for a recession, labor unions less equipped for potential layoffs, families less able to predict how far their paycheck will go.
The collection of quality data is often labor-intensive, sometimes requiring massive field operations. When agency funding and staff levels cannot support the full collection effort, we risk losing the kind of data that is the hardest, and most essential, to collect: data in rural areas, smaller geographies, and often historically undercounted populations. This kind of slow data erasure poses serious challenges for tax policy research and modeling.
For example, the Census Bureau employs thousands of field representatives to interview households and businesses for a range of surveys. But since January, 1,300 Census Bureau employees have reportedly left, further hamstringing data collection in an already understaffed agency. Previously, when the agency faced funding shortfalls in 2016, it cancelled its field testing aimed at improving counts in Spanish-speaking areas and on Indigenous reservations for the 2020 Census. These hard-to-count communities are often central to our analyses of tax equity.
BLS faces similar challenges. Inflation data relies on data collectors to record price data from thousands of retailers across the country. These operations are being forced to scale back due to shrinking resources and in some cases have stopped altogether. Despite this, Trump’s 2026 budget proposal reduces the BLS budget by $56 million and proposes a major restructuring of the agency. This data is foundational to many aspects of modeling; it allows us to compare the impact of policy over time in “real” terms and project policy impacts out into the future.
At the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), staffing levels in the Research, Applied Analytics, and Statistics office have decreased by 29% since January. As a result, the IRS has indefinitely postponed its Joint Statistical Research Program, which produced original research and novel data sets that the Institution on Taxation and Economic Policy frequently relies on to inform our own modeling of tax policy and taxpayer behavior.
Distrust in data will harm every American, leaving businesses less able to prepare for a recession, labor unions less equipped for potential layoffs, families less able to predict how far their paycheck will go. At the height of Covid-19 deaths in June 2020, Trump famously said, “if we stop testing right now, we’d have very few cases if any.” A similar approach is emerging on job creation, economic growth, and tax collections: If reality doesn’t conform to the narrative, destroy the evidence.
The federal government’s statistical agencies are full of nonpartisan career economists and statisticians who work hard to be responsible stewards of our nation’s data. And they continue to do so even under tight resource constraints and amid a fiercely partisan political environment. But last week’s attacks on BLS fuel growing fears among researchers and policy analysts that the data we rely on to understand policy may one day be compromised, suppressed, or deleted altogether.
The Olympics Is the Last Thing LA Needs as It Deals With Fires and ICE
A new poll from the anti-Olympics coalition NOlympicsLA finds that public support for the Los Angeles 2028 Olympics has soured significantly over time.
Aug 05, 2025
When the International Olympic Committee announced in September 2017 that Los Angeles would host the 2028 Summer Olympics, then-Mayor Eric Garcetti predicted, “The Olympics will spur a bold vision for our city.” Eight years later, enthusiasm in the City of Angels has dwindled considerably.
Current Mayor Karen Bass is under increasing pressure from locals who are concerned that LA, which is already experiencing a budget crisis, will be stiffed with a hefty Olympic bill. Under U.S. President Donald Trump, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, is wreaking havoc on the city’s immigrant population, with masked agents in military-style garb snatching Angelenos off the streets—often violently—and cramming them into vans and ultimately into detention facilities with inhumane conditions.
Amid the mayhem, a new poll from the anti-Olympics coalition NOlympicsLA finds that public support for the Los Angeles 2028 Olympics has soured significantly over time. A firm majority of respondents—some 54%—asserted a preference for spending public resources on wildfire recovery rather than the Olympics. Less than a quarter of respondents (24%) supported funding the Olympics over those still reeling from the wildfires that swept through LA in January 2025, ravaging places like the historically Black foothill community of Altadena.
The poll also found a notable age gap, with millennials and Gen Z overwhelmingly spurning the LA28 Games. A mere 22% of those polled between the ages of 18 and 29 were supportive of LA28 whereas in the 45-to-60 age bracket 53% supported the Games. The NOlympics LA survey also uncovered a gender gap: Women were more likely than men to oppose or be neutral toward hosting the LA 2028 Games (40% to 23% of men) and keener to prioritize wildfire recovery over Olympic preparations (61% to 49% for men).
The Olympics have a long and ignominious tradition of short-circuiting democracy, but it’s not too late for Los Angeles to make amends.
The Olympics tend to be popular in the abstract, but as the reality of hosting the Olympics draws closer—with overspending, gentrification, displacement, police intensification, greenwashing, and corruption coming into sharper focus—public support tends to shrink.
For instance, a few months ahead of the Paris 2024 summer Olympics, a poll found that 44% of Parisians thought the 2024 Olympics were a “bad idea.” Then, a couple weeks before the Paris 2024 Olympics kicked off, another poll discovered that the French were less than thrilled at the prospect. More than 65% of the population was either indifferent (36%), concerned (24%), or angry (5%) about hosting the Olympics.
At the Tokyo 2020 Summer Games, staged a year later in 2021 amid the coronavirus pandemic, a whopping 83% stated that the games should be either postponed again or scrapped altogether. When the public ramped up pressure on Japan’s Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga to take action, he was forced to admit that the host-city contract handed the power to cancel or postpone solely to the International Olympic Committee. The IOC ignored public opinion and rammed ahead, resulting in a dramatic uptick of Covid-19 rates in Tokyo during and after the games, while more than 800 people tested positive for Covid-19 inside the so-called “Olympic bubble.”
To say the Olympics has a democracy problem is to make an understatement. Where democratic practice flourishes, the Olympics tend to struggle to gain popular traction. Between 2013 and 2018 alone, more than a dozen cities rejected their Olympic bids, after either losing a public referendum, facing the mere prospect of a public vote, or succumbing to political pressure against the games.
This is precisely why the International Olympic Committee opted in September 2017 for the hail-Mary move of announcing two host cities at once, selecting Paris to stage the 2024 Summer Games and Los Angeles to host in 2028. The two cities were originally bidding for the 2024 Olympics, but after conspicupus bid withdrawals from Boston, Budapest, Hamburg, and Rome, the IOC made the unusual dual declaration. Neither Paris nor Los Angeles carried out a public referendum where voters could weigh in on whether or not to host the complicated and expensive sports mega-event.
The NOlympicsLA poll asked Angelenos their thoughts on the possibility of a democratic referendum on the games. Their results were bracing. They found that “only 54% would vote to support LA28 if there were a referendum tomorrow.”
Turns out, a referendum might be on the horizon. In Los Angeles, Unite Here Local 11, the union that represents hotel and restaurant workers, has filed paperwork to create a ballot measure that would provide LA voters a chance to weigh in on whether to develop or expand “event centers” like sports venues, convention facilities, or hotels. The union not only zeroed in on permanent facilities, but also temporary structures like ones being proposed for the 2028 Olympics. As the Los Angeles Times reported, this “could force at least five Olympic venues to go before voters for approval,” including the LA Convention Center, the John C. Argue Swim Stadium, and the Sepulveda Basin Recreation Area, which is slated to host Olympic events like 3-on-3 basketball and skateboarding in the San Fernando Valley.
Jonny Coleman, an organizer with NOlympicsLA, pointed out to Common Dreams that “this polling took place before the budget crisis and before the ICE incursion.” He added, “We believe our message has reached many more Angelenos since this poll was conducted, and we are confident more and more Angelenos will reject LA28 and the World Cup on the basis of the ICE collaboration alone.” He also noted that organizers with LA28 have “not made a single public comment since June 6 about the violence taking place against working class Angelenos and how that will continue to be weaponized.”
The Olympics have a long and ignominious tradition of short-circuiting democracy, but it’s not too late for Los Angeles to make amends. While it’s true that neither the word “democracy” nor “democratic” appear in the host-city contract between the IOC and LA, Angelenos could force a democratic vote on key issues. NOlympicsLA’s new poll shows that there is a fresh interest in asking big questions about the 2028 LA Games.
Comedian John Mulaney recently joked that “making LA host the Olympics… would be like if you had a friend, and she was having a nervous breakdown, and she had no money, and part of her house was on fire. And to cheer her up, you made her host the Olympics.”
Well, the joke may end up being on LA28 Olympic organizers who thought they could press ahead with status-quo thinking in a whipsaw world. A public referendum on the LA Olympics, set against the backdrop of an increasingly authoritarian country, might be just what the democracy doctor ordered.
Landlord Doublespeak and the Rise of the 'Housing Provider'
What drives the preference of landlords to call themselves “housing providers” is a desire to euphemize the landlord-tenant relationship and to obscure some of its basic and most important features.
Jul 30, 2025
Landlords want to be called “housing providers.” Industry organizations in California, Washington, Rhode Island, and elsewhere are proudly claiming the label. Equal to this craving to be called “housing providers,” it seems, is the wish among landlords to no longer be called landlords. The term is antiquated, they say, and has a negative stigma that doesn’t reflect reality. The industry is not particularly secretive about these desires or the reasons behind them, which have to do with image and narrative.
The dictionary definition of landlord is precise enough, however, and, in fact, couldn’t be plainer: “The owner of property (such as land, houses, or apartments) that is leased or rented to another,” according to Merriam-Webster.com. The definition identifies the essential feature of any residential landlord—that they engage in a financial transaction to lease living space. This seems straightforward enough and noncontroversial. The motivation of the industry is thus not related to any mismatch between our common understanding of the word and its most essential attribute.
Instead, what drives the preference of landlords to call themselves “housing providers” is a type of Orwellian doublespeak intended to euphemize the landlord-tenant relationship and to obscure some of its basic and most important features. What does the phrase obscure? For one, it elides the basic extractive nature of landlording, the fact that landlords expect, in fact, rely upon the relationship to be monetarily profitable to them. This is the critical fact of landlording, that it is done in the main to make a profit.
Granted there are some instances of landlords renting to family members or others without expectations of profit, but these exceptions are merely that—exceptions. The English language routinely makes distinctions between services rendered for a fee and those provided on other bases. The difference between “housing provider” and landlord is the difference between a date and a paid escort or sex worker, it is the difference between the volunteer and the mercenary, between a financial gift and an interest-bearing loan. The English language is not unique in containing words that make clear the monetary exchange and profit that define some relationships. We use these words because the information they contain is consequential.
If the landlord industry truly wants to do something to burnish its public image, it might consider publicly rejecting or sanctioning members of its community who hiked rents in Los Angeles County by 20% in the aftermath of the fires of January 2025.
This attempt to obscure the profit motive in landlording is all the more problematic because those who would call themselves “housing providers” in one breath, will, in the next, argue against rent stabilization, tenant protections, and other regulations on the basis that these policies make their business unprofitable, or less profitable than they would prefer. This is wanting it both ways—attempting to hide the profit motive while simultaneously insisting on it.
“Housing provider” is also meant to conceal the power dynamics of the landlord-tenant relationship, one in which landlords hold the privileges associated with property ownership, the ability to define the terms of acceptable behavior and limits of property use available to tenants, and the ultimate power of eviction. Moreover, at a time when corporate landlords are extending their reach into the market, and we see the spread of price-fixing algorithms to maximize rents and profit, AI-driven tenant screening algorithms to perform background checks, and greater concentration and market power at the industry scale, the insistence on the phrase “housing provider” is an obvious attempt at happy-faced distraction.
Just as important as the attempt to disguise profit motive and landlord power is the effort to dodge whatever negative connotations attach to the term landlord. “Housing provider” is meant to avoid images of rapaciousness and greed, or to conjure images of benevolence and even charity, or to do both. The use of the phrase is, in other words, an attempt, acknowledged by the industry, to control a narrative. As such it is a political act, an effort to persuade and to establish a particular understanding of who landlords are and what they do, all in the service of influencing public debate and public policy. This is not to argue that tenants don’t also try to influence the public narrative; of course they do. It is merely to note that this phrase, “housing provider,” is a calculated bid to construct meaning in a highly contested policy area and it needs to be recognized as such. Those who choose to adopt the phrase choose to adopt the narrative.
If the landlord industry truly wants to do something to burnish its public image, it might consider publicly rejecting or sanctioning members of its community who hiked rents in Los Angeles County by 20% in the aftermath of the fires of January 2025. It might help to police property owners who evicted tenants during the pandemic in violation of federal and local laws. It might take action to address sexual harassment of low-income women by landlords, or address any of a number of discriminatory or exploitative practices that haunt the industry. Those wishing to hide behind the “housing provider” label will argue that not all landlords are bad, which is of course true. They will say only a portion of landlords engage in the practices that give landlord its stigma. But, if the only response by the industry is to stop using the word landlord, it betrays a self-serving concern that does little to improve negative public perceptions and, in fact, largely confirms them.
We don’t call Exxon an “oil provider,” nor do we call GM an “automobile provider.” We don’t even call the corner mom-and-pop store a “grocery provider.” There is no reason to accept the kind of politically motivated doublespeak behind the rise of “housing provider.”
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