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office of management and budget
Think Tank Launches 'One-Stop Shop' for Economic Info to Fight Trump's War on Data
"We’re collecting all data we can to assess the economy’s health in this time when the gold standard data are under attack,” said the Economic Policy Institute's senior economist.
Nov 18, 2025
Amid President Donald Trump's efforts to conceal the harmful consequences of his economic policies by hiding key data and replacing economists who tell harsh truths with partisan yes-people, a leading US think tank on Monday announced a new digital dashboard "to provide an accountability check" against attempts to manipulate and mislead the public.
The Economic Policy Institute (EPI) says its new data accountability dashboard "serves as a one-stop shop" for economic data as federal statistic agencies (FSAs), once the "gold standard" for information, "face historically unprecedented threats from the Trump administration to their capacity and even their independence."
"This raises the specter of a future where FSA data cannot be relied upon to honestly report whether the US economy is experiencing dysfunction," EPI said.
In a bid to circumvent this, the EPI dashboard "displays a range of data not collected or disseminated by FSAs to shed some light on the economy during the pause in government data collection during the shutdown and—even more importantly—to provide an accountability check against efforts to manipulate FSA data in the future."
The federal statistical agencies (FSAs) that produce the gold standard economic data employers/investors/job seekers/workers/policymakers rely on to assess the health of the U.S. economy face unprecedented threats.We've pulled next-best data from non-FSA sources to help keep an eye on things. 1/
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— Economic Policy Institute (@epi.org) November 18, 2025 at 7:19 AM
As EPI senior economist Elise Gould explained in a statement: “The data collected by the federal statistical agencies are an incredibly valuable public good. While there would never be a good time to squander it, the absolute worst time to degrade data quality is when the economy is facing policy shocks that threaten to cause either a recession or an uptick of inflation."
"Given this urgency, we’re collecting all data we can to assess the economy’s health in this time when the gold standard data are under attack,” she added.
Trump's attempts to hide unfavorable economic data date back to his first administration, when he blocked or delayed economic analyses on the projected impacts of his tariffs. For example, half a dozen economists at the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) quit en masse in April 2019, claiming they suffered retaliation for publishing reports that shed negative light on the president's trade and taxation policies.
In a related move that year, the USDA abruptly relocated its Economic Research Service main office from Washington, DC to Kansas City, Missouri, prompting another wave of resignations. ERS publications—including reports on farm income, rural economies, and trade impacts—dropped sharply, with key analyses delayed or blocked. Critics, including former agency officials, argued that the move to Kansas City was intended to conceal negative impacts of Trump's trade policies from the public.
During Trump's second administration, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick disbanded the Federal Economic Statistics Advisory Committee (FESAC), a key body that worked under the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Economic Analysis to ensure that the federal government produces accurate data on economic indicators.
Trump also gutted the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Technical Advisory Committee, which had advised the Department of Labor about how economic changes can impact data collection. In August, Trump fired BLS Commissioner Erika McEntarfer, baselessly accusing her of manipulating economic data to harm him politically by publishing a jobs report showing weak employment growth.
Two weeks later, the president nominated EJ Antoni, a senior economist at the Heritage Foundation described as a "partisan bomb thrower" who helped write Project 2025, a blueprint for a far-right overhaul of the federal government, to replace McEntarfer. Antoni stunned critics with suggestions including eliminating federal monthly jobs reports, and with his overall lack of data management experience. His nomination was later withdrawn amid mounting controversy.
Additionally, the Trump administration has summarily fired dozens of independent agency leaders, required every federal agency to have a White House liaison, and required ostensibly independent agencies to submit draft regulations to the Office of Management and Budget—headed by Project 2025 architect Russell Vought—for review before publication.
As Common Dreams reported, an analysis published in September by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities detailed how the Trump administration's politicization of data, combined with funding cuts, is making it more difficult for experts to determine how the president's policies are impacting US households.
From ending tracking of the impacts of climate-driven extreme weather, to removing a study from the Department of Justice website that showed violent attacks by far-right extremists outpaced those committed by the left, to removing questions about gender identity from key crime surveys, the Trump administration's attacks on information transcend economic data.
"The assault on data, research, and facts is fundamental to Trump and his authoritarian regime," Liza Featherstone, a contributing editor at The New Republic, recently wrote. "He seems to understand that data provides the basis for arguments, and he does not want any arguments. He also understands that facts and knowledge can only be nourished and sustained by institutions and experts, so he is destroying those institutions and pink-slipping those experts."
"We must appreciate their importance and their stakes as well as he does, and remain as committed to the institutions, the data, the facts, and the experts as Trump is to their eradication," Featherstone added. "He has brought sincere zeal to their destruction, and we must bring an even greater passion to their restoration and renaissance. We will need it, as ours is the harder job."
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Trump and Vought Turn Shutdown Into a 'Weapon' to Target Democrats
"It's going to harm them," boasted Sen. Mike Lee, a top Trump cheerleader. "Russ Vought, the OMB director, has been dreaming about this moment... since puberty."
Oct 02, 2025
President Donald Trump is using the government shutdown to carry out an unprecedented attack on his enemies through more layoffs of federal workers and cuts to grants aimed at blue states.
In the Oval Office Tuesday, hours before the shutdown began, Trump told reporters that “when you shut it down, you have to do layoffs. So, we’d be laying off a lot of people that are going to be very affected, and they’re Democrats. They’re gonna be Democrats.”
In the days leading up to the shutdown, congressional Democrats attempted to force Republicans to roll back cuts to Medicaid and Affordable Care Act subsidies—cuts that are expected to result in as many as 15 million Americans losing their health insurance while raising premiums for tens of millions more. Trump and the GOP have blamed Democrats for the shutdown, falsely claiming that theyare pushing to fund free healthcare for "illegal aliens."
However, they've struggled to make this story land with the American public. A Washington Post poll released Thursday found that 47% of US adults blame Trump and Republicans for the shutdown, while just 30% blame Democrats and 23% say they are unsure. The sample was divided roughly equally between those who voted for Trump and those who voted for former Vice President Kamala Harris (D) in 2024.
In what Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) called an effort to use "taxpayer dollars to try and shift blame," the websites for numerous government agencies—including the US departments of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), as well as Justice, Agriculture, and several others—were updated with banners that blamed "Democrats" and the "Radical Left" for the shutdown.
Meanwhile, government employees, including those at the Small Business Administration (SBA) were directed to include similar partisan language in their out-of-office auto-reply emails.
Experts have told Politico that the use of taxpayer money for such explicit partisan messaging likely violates multiple ethics laws, including the Anti-Lobbying Act, which forbids the use of appropriated funds for lobbying activities designed to “support or defeat legislation pending before Congress.” It also pushes the boundaries of the Hatch Act, which requires federal programs to be used in a nonpartisan fashion.
The progressive consumer watchdog group Public Citizen said it has filed complaints against HUD and the SBA for what it said was an "obvious Hatch Act violation."
"The SBA and other agencies increasingly adopting this illegal, partisan tactic think they can get away with it because Trump has gutted any and all ethics oversight of the federal government," said Craig Holman, a government ethics expert with Public Citizen.
After being asked about Trump's promise to lay off "Democrats" at a press conference on Wednesday, Vice President JD Vance told reporters, "We are not targeting federal agencies based on politics."
But in a Truth Social post early Thursday morning Trump struck a somewhat different tone. He spoke of plans to meet with Russell Vought, the director of the White House's Office of Management and Budget (OMB), "to determine which of the many Democrat Agencies, most of which are a political SCAM, he recommends to be cut. I can’t believe the Radical Left Democrats gave me this unprecedented opportunity."
Trump also proudly described Vought as "he of PROJECT 2025 fame," referencing his leading role in crafting the Heritage Foundation's infamous blueprint for a far-right takeover of government—a takeover carried out in part through the purging of civil servants disloyal to Trump. During the 2024 election, Trump repeatedly insisted that he had "nothing to do with" Project 2025.
Vought has already begun to unilaterally withhold congressionally appropriated dollars for projects specifically for blue cities and states.
On Wednesday, he said that $18 billion in subway and tunnel funding for New York City had been “put on hold to ensure funding is not flowing based on unconstitutional [diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI)] principles.” Not long before that, Trump had threatened to entirely cut off federal funding to the city if its voters elect the democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic nominee and current frontrunner, as its next mayor in November.
Vought then announced Thursday that he was also stripping away another nearly $8 billion worth of funding for climate-related projects, referring to it as "Green New SCAM funding to fuel the Left's climate agenda." Vought said that the funding was being withheld exclusively from projects in states led by Democrats: California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Vermont, and Washington state.
House Republicans were reportedly told by Vought on Wednesday that mass firings would also begin in "one to two" days, though he did not outline specifics about who would be fired. However, a memo Vought issued last week instructed agencies to prepare to eliminate employees “not consistent with the president’s priorities," triggering a lawsuit from federal workers' unions.
House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) told the press Thursday that Vought was carrying out these cuts "reluctantly" and is "not enjoying the responsibility" of deciding which programs and employees get the axe.
But in an interview on Fox News, Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah), a top Trump cheerleader, was a bit more candid, proudly declaring that Trump and Vought are using the shutdown specifically to hurt Democrats.
"They're doing it deliberately. It's going to harm them," Lee said. "Because Russ Vought, the OMB director, has been dreaming about this moment, preparing for this moment, since puberty."
Rep. Mike Levin (D-Calif.) said that "Vought is pushing a scheme to turn a government shutdown into a weapon to fire career civil servants and dismantle programs Congress has already passed into law. That is not only reckless. It is flatly illegal and unconstitutional."
"Have we ever had a president work so hard to hurt the people he represents?" asked Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.). "I'm not going to be intimidated by these crooks."
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Unions Sue to Protect Federal Workers From Mass Firings During Government Shutdown
"If these mass firings take place, the people who keep our skies safe for travel, our food supply secure, and our communities protected will lose their jobs," one labor leader warned.
Sep 30, 2025
Just hours before an expected US government shutdown, two major unions for federal workers filed a lawsuit on Tuesday in hopes of protecting them from the Trump administration's threat of mass firings.
"Announcing plans to fire potentially tens of thousands of federal employees simply because Congress and the administration are at odds on funding the government past the end of the fiscal year is not only illegal—it's immoral and unconscionable," American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) national president Everett Kelley said in a statement.
"Federal employees dedicate their careers to public service—more than a third are military veterans—and the contempt being shown them by this administration is appalling," Kelley declared.
Filed by AFGE and the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) in the Northern District of California, the new suit specifically takes aim at the Office of Management and Budget, OMB Director Russell Vought, the Office of Personnel Management, and OPM Director Scott Kupor.
"Federal workers do the work of the people, and playing games with their livelihoods is cruel and unlawful."
The OMB last week "issued a memorandum threatening that if 'congressional Democrats' do not agree to the administration's
demands, and the federal government shuts down, there will be mass firings of federal employees," the complaint explains. The memo "takes the legally unsupportable position that a temporary interruption of appropriations eliminates the statutory requirement for all unfunded government programs and directs all federal agencies to 'use this opportunity' to consider reductions in force (RIFs) for any programs for which the funding has lapsed and that are not priorities of the president."
"This past weekend, the Trump administration doubled down on its illegal activity," the complaint notes, as OMB and OPM "told agencies that federal employees could work during the shutdown in order to effectuate these RIFs. But this directive is contrary to federal law, because carrying out RIFs is plainly not a permitted (or 'excepted') function that can lawfully continue during a shutdown."
"The threat of massive layoffs was repeated and reinforced yesterday by the White House press secretary who, when asked whether there will be mass layoffs of federal employees, answered, 'There will be if Democrats don't keep the government open,'" the filing continues. "These actions are contrary to law and arbitrary and capricious, and the cynical use of federal employees as a pawn in congressional deliberations should be declared unlawful and enjoined by this court."
AFSCME president Lee Saunders highlighted how the firing threat connects to Project 2025, a policy agenda from a host of far-right figures, including Vought, published last year, in the lead-up to the November election.
"The Trump administration is once again breaking the law to push its extreme Project 2025 agenda, illegally targeting federal workers with threats of mass firings due to the federal government shutdown," Saunders said. "If these mass firings take place, the people who keep our skies safe for travel, our food supply secure, and our communities protected will lose their jobs. We will do everything possible to defend these AFSCME members and their fellow workers from an administration hell-bent on stripping away their collective bargaining rights and jobs."
AFSCME and AFGE are represented by Altshuler Berzon LLP, Democracy Defenders Fund, and Democracy Forward, whose president and CEO, Skye Perryman, accused President Donald Trump of "using the civil service as a bargaining chip as he marches the American people into a government shutdown."
"Federal workers do the work of the people, and playing games with their livelihoods is cruel and unlawful. That is why we have sued today," said Perryman, whose group has played a leading role in challenging the administration in court, as an increasingly authoritarian Trump and his Department of Government Efficiency have worked to gut the federal bureaucracy.
"Since inauguration, this administration has pursued a harmful Project 2025 agenda, attacking community programs and charities, lawyers, schools, private companies, law firms, judges, universities, public servants, and the programs, foundations, and civil servants working to deliver services to people and keep communities safe," she noted. "No one's lives have been made easier or better by these actions, and we will continue to meet these attacks in court. We are honored to again represent AFGE and AFSCME in protecting the American people from the Trump-Vance administration's callous and unlawful agenda."
The government will shut down at midnight unless Congress takes action. Although the GOP controls both chambers and the White House, they lack the numbers to advance most legislation in the Senate without Democratic support. The Senate voted Tuesday evening on Democrats' and Republicans' competing resolutions, neither of which passed.
Democrats have fought to expand Affordable Care Act subsidies and reverse cuts to Medicaid in the so-called One Big Beautiful Bill Act that congressional Republicans passed and Trump signed this summer. GOP leaders have refused to consider walking back their assault on the healthcare of millions of Americans.
In the event of a shutdown, "non-expected" employees are furloughed while "excepted" employees continue working, but no one gets paid until the shutdown ends.
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