SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
jobs report
Don’t Put a Social Security Hater in Charge of Our Economic Data
With the nomination of EJ Antoni to lead the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there is reason to be fearful of the Trump administration massaging or outright falsifying key economic statistics that help determine crucial benefits.
Aug 13, 2025
On Monday, U.S. President Donald Trump nominated EJ Antoni, the chief economist at the Heritage Foundation, to lead the Bureau of Labor Statistics, or BLS. The nomination came 10 days after Trump fired Erika McEntarfer, baselessly accusing her of having “rigged” the July jobs report, which showed a slowing labor market and contained large downward revisions to payroll employment for the previous two months. Antoni, in line with Trump’s false assertions of fraud, has proposed halting the monthly jobs report entirely.
Antoni is not the sort of figure you want at the helm of a statistical agency. He has a long history of egregiously misrepresenting BLS data or, perhaps worse, misunderstanding it in extremely basic ways. He has called Social Security a “Ponzi scheme” and said that we “need to sunset the program.” His nomination has been panned by figures across the political spectrum. Stan Veuger of the conservative American Enterprise Institute, for instance, minced no words in his statement to The Washington Post: “He’s utterly unqualified and as partisan as it gets.”
The partisan transformation of BLS holds untold dangers, given that BLS data is baked into our economic policy. Policymakers look at the rates of unemployment and inflation when setting policy, of course, but by law, several BLS data series also provide for the automatic adjustment of social insurance programs and welfare benefits. Juking the stats could harm the massive number of people that make use of these programs.
How Inflation Data Affects Your Income
The most obvious way that BLS data affects our safety net is through the cost-of-living adjustment (COLA) afforded to retirees on Social Security—an annual benefit boost meant to keep up with inflation. The COLA is calculated using BLS’ Consumer Price Index for Urban Wage Earners and Clerical Workers (CPI-W), and in addition to retirees, people on Social Security Disability Insurance, Supplemental Security Income, and Veterans Disability Compensation receive COLAs. For many of the people on these programs, the benefits make up a significant chunk of their income. Roughly 40% of Social Security recipients receive more than 50% of their income from the program, for instance.
CPI data affects a number of other benefit programs as well. The Department of Agriculture uses CPI data to determine the cost of the Thrifty Food Plan, which is in turn used to calculate benefit allotments for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), also known as food stamps. The Department of Housing and Urban Development uses CPI data in the calculation of Fair Market Rents, a metric which determines the benefit amount for housing vouchers, among other applications. Eligibility for SNAP, Medicaid, and (in most states) Temporary Assistance for Needy Families is tied to the federal poverty level, which the Department of Health and Human Services updates annually using CPI data.
If Antoni is able to make inflation look artificially low to benefit Trump politically, anyone who receives any kind of inflation-adjusted income should feel cheated.
In all, according to the Bureau, “The CPI affects the income of more than 108 million people because of statutory action.” In other words, one-third of Americans have a source of income whose relationship to BLS data is written in the law. Virtually all of us will at some point in our lives receive benefits for which this is the case—assuming that Antoni is unsuccessful in sunsetting Social Security. The relationship between the CPI and your income also extends beyond public benefits: It is widely used in employment contracts, for example, for workers’ annual cost-of-living raises (especially in unionized workplaces).
Manipulating the stats is easier said than done, but if Antoni is able to make inflation look artificially low to benefit Trump politically, anyone who receives any kind of inflation-adjusted income should feel cheated.
How Jobs Data Affects Your Ability to Access Unemployment Insurance
In several states, the duration of state-level unemployment insurance benefits varies according to the state’s unemployment rate (recall that Trump fired Commissioner McEntarfer over the jobs numbers). In Florida and Georgia, residents are currently capped at 12 weeks of unemployment insurance based on their low unemployment rates (the standard in other states is 26 weeks). In April, Massachusetts extended the maximum duration of unemployment insurance from 26 weeks to 30 weeks based on its statutory trigger: that one of its metro areas had an unemployment rate greater than 5.1%. To make that determination, it used BLS’ Local Area Unemployment Statistics program.
At the federal level, we also have an extended benefits program, which provides 13 additional weeks of unemployment insurance to workers in states dealing with high unemployment. States are required to use an “insured unemployment rate” trigger, which turns “on” when a large portion of workers within the state are receiving unemployment insurance—calculated by states using the BLS’ Quarterly Census of Earnings and Wages. States can also adopt various optional triggers, all of which use BLS data in some way.
(BLS data serves as an input into much more than I am able to specify here. If you want to learn more, I recommend checking out the BLS’ Handbook of Methods. Pick a subject area, then a survey, then navigate to the “presentation” tab, where BLS often cites examples of how the data you have selected tends to be used—by researchers, agencies, the private sector, and more.)
EJ Antoni Doesn’t Care About Your Income; He Cares About Keeping Trump Happy
With the nomination of EJ Antoni to lead BLS, there is reason to be fearful of the Trump administration massaging or outright falsifying key economic statistics. Antoni cannot be trusted to run the BLS as an independent, nonpartisan body, and we should watch the data accordingly. If Antoni can rig things to make the economy look better for Trump, bad data will feed into a system that takes these estimates at face value. Inflation is low, says Trump, so your COLA is low. Unemployment is low, says Trump, so you can’t remain on unemployment insurance.
Antoni certainly doesn’t seem to care if you lose out on some of the benefits you are duly owed. In a 2018 article co-written with Stephen Moore, Antoni said that “the cost of welfare” is “disgusting” and advocated for the government to “moderately and slowly cut benefits so that, over time, some programs can be eliminated.” (They declined to say which programs.)
Much of the law governing our safety net depends on assumptions that Trump has brought into question: that our economic data is sound, and that the civil servants producing it are impartial, rigorous, and dedicated to the data itself.
The BLS is also already struggling in ways that Antoni is likely to make worse. Trump’s hiring freeze has impeded the agency’s data collection efforts, as BLS and the Census Bureau, which collects the data for many of BLS’ surveys, have both lost many staffers. As a result, BLS has reduced data collection for the CPI substantially in recent months, and it has discontinued some 350 indexes in the Producer Price Index. This decline in data quality poses its own threat to our economic data, apart from Trump’s desire to see good numbers.
Antoni, for his part, has praised the Department of Government Efficiency’s mass firings of civil servants and in November advocated for DOGE to “take a chainsaw to the BLS.” Those comments suggest he’ll be disinclined to address—or even acknowledge—the understaffing problem.
Much of the law governing our safety net depends on assumptions that Trump has brought into question: that our economic data is sound, and that the civil servants producing it are impartial, rigorous, and dedicated to the data itself. If EJ Antoni is confirmed as BLS Commissioner, we will all have one more reason to fear for our economic security.
Keep ReadingShow Less
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.
Keep ReadingShow Less
'Living in a Fantasy World': Critics Pounce as Trump's CNBC Interview Goes Off the Rails
"The racism here is on steroids," said one critic about Trump's statements on immigrant farmworkers.
Aug 05, 2025
U.S. President Donald Trump gave a lengthy interview to CNBC on Tuesday and critics quickly pounced on the president for telling a large number of false claims on topics ranging from monthly jobs numbers to the price of gas to international trade agreements.
Toward the start of the interview, CNBC host Joe Kernen pushed back on Trump's claims that the Bureau of Labor Statistics had "rigged" job creation numbers against him and debunked a Trump statement that the BLS had covered up negative jobs data revisions under the Biden administration until after the November 2024 presidential election.
Trump, however, insisted that his statements about hiding downward revisions until after the election were correct even though the biggest downward revisions actually occurred in August 2024, well before the election took place.
Trump is on CNBC making a case that jobs numbers are rigged -- even as MAGA-friendly host Joe Kernen tries to push back pic.twitter.com/9jAkiCDI8h
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) August 5, 2025
Commenting on Trump's assertion, Media Matters for America senior fellow Matt Gertz described it as "completely backwards."
"The BLS announcement on November 1 [2024] showed weak growth of 12,000 jobs in October and downward revisions to August/September of 112,000," Gertz explained on X. "Then after the election, the October figure was revised upward. Impossible to tell if Trump is lying, dumb, or sundowning."
Nick Tiriamos, the chief economics correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, similarly said that Trump was "getting his dates wrong" when he asserted a cover-up of negative jobs numbers given that "the big downward revision" was reported before the election took place.
Trump also made also false claims about the price of gas in the United States falling to just $2.20 per gallon, which prompted Kernen to note that the lowest prices he's seen for gas in the U.S. were $2.80 per gallon.
TRUMP: Joe, looking at energy. Energy is down $2.20 cents a barre-- a gallon for a car
KERNEN: I've seen $2.80 pic.twitter.com/6GIfGG5JJf
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) August 5, 2025
National security attorney Bradley Moss slammed Trump for his claim about gas prices and added that the latest data show that inflation has been accelerating in recent months as the president's tariffs begin to force companies to raise prices.
"The rest of the country is suffering from higher prices on everything, and this senile old man is living in a fantasy world in which it's simply not happening," he wrote on Bluesky.
Trump proceeded to make false claims about the trade deal he had recently struck with the European Union when he said that the agreement gave him "$600 billion to invest in anything I want." This drew the ire of Steve Peers, a professor of E.U. and human rights law at Royal Holloway University of London.
"Well no, it's a vague, nonbinding, unwritten nonstatement about companies' future investment plans, not cash for him to personally control," Peers commented on Bluesky. "But enjoy your weird demented fantasy, I guess."
Another eye-popping Trump statement came when he tried to defend the use of immigrant labor in the American agricultural industry by claiming that the immigrants had unique physical attributes that were absent from American workers.
"People that live in the inner city are not doing that work," Trump said of the prospects of American citizens picking crops. "They've tried, we've tried, everybody tried. They don't do it. These people [immigrants] do it naturally. Naturally... they don't get a bad back, because if they get a bad back, they die."
Trump on undocumented farm workers: "People that live in the inner city are not doing that work. They've tried, we've tried, everybody tried. They don't do it. These people do it naturally. Naturally ... they don't get a bad back, because if they get a bad back, they die." pic.twitter.com/HxXtKtIPLa
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) August 5, 2025
This statement drew the attention of Branden McEuen, a historian at Wayne State University who specializes in teaching about the history of the eugenics movement. Specifically, McEuen linked Trump's statement to past racist beliefs about people of color being genetically predisposed to engage in manual labor.
"Trump saying people of color are naturally suited to farm labor sure sounds a lot like the slaveholders that said slaves were naturally inclined to servitude," he remarked.
SiriusXM radio host Michelangelo Signorile picked up a similar vibe from Trump's statement about farmworkers.
"The racism here is on steroids, as Trump tried to make [the] case to MAGA that farmers need exemptions," he wrote. "[Trump] says brown people do hard labor 'naturally' and don't get [a] bad back, while also saying they've tried to replace them with people 'in the inner city' but they can't get them to do the work."
Keep ReadingShow Less
Most Popular