DOGE attack on bureaucracy raises economic security concerns

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After United States President Donald Trump has taken steps to access and even remove data at federal agencies, statisticians are sounding the alarm that economic numbers need to be protected.

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A group of unions have sued to block Trump’s new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) from accessing computers at the Labor Department, which oversees the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). An advocacy group is calling on Congress to ensure that public information won’t be removed from government websites after certain pages went dark in the past week.

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All the while DOGE is making the rounds in Washington to infiltrate systems and cut costs, and the administration is moving to insert its own picks into roles traditionally reserved for civil servants.

That’s raising concern around not only the availability of data, but also its integrity. Economists and statisticians say they’re worried about political influence creeping into agencies that produce numbers that the public — as well as policymakers and investors — rely on to make decisions around the world.

“If we can’t agree that the data are credible, valid, objective, then that undermines civil discourse,” said Steve Pierson, director of science policy at the American Statistics Association.

A judge will consider on Friday whether DOGE can access Labor’s systems. The group was granted limited access to the Treasury Department’s payments system, at least for now, after unions tried to block it.

Certain agency web pages vanished in the past week following an executive order to remove diversity, equity and inclusion language from government websites.

Separately, several years’ worth of population data from the Census Bureau couldn’t be accessed late Thursday. It was unclear why, and some were back Friday morning. The 2024 figures were incorporated into revisions published in Friday’s employment report from the BLS. They affect the unemployment rate and the size of the labour force.

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The White House, BLS and Census didn’t respond to messages seeking comment.

Even before the new Trump administration, U.S. statistical agencies were under pressure from budget constraints. And fewer people have been responding to government surveys in the past decade, affecting how much data agencies produce and the quality of the numbers.

U.S. economic data — which covers everything from the labor market and inflation to trade and manufacturing — is at the root of the financial world, often moving markets by trillions of dollars at a time upon release. It’s also crucial for policymakers at the Federal Reserve who set interest rates, as well as leaders in all levels of government and businesses for making investment decisions.

2020 Census

Trump raised some red flags in his first term by trying to insert a controversial citizenship question into the 2020 census, which critics said was designed to exclude undocumented immigrants. His administration also interfered by ending the count early, which civil rights groups said would underestimate minorities as a result.

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Howard Lutnick — Trump’s pick this time around to lead the Commerce Department, which oversees the Census Bureau — said at his confirmation hearing last week that “we will count each whole person” for the census. The once-in-a-decade data is critical for allocating congressional seats as well as distributing trillions of dollars in federal funding.

Robert Santos, who was appointed by President Joe Biden, recently resigned as director of Census, which will give Trump the opportunity to select a replacement in the midst of planning for the 2030 census.

While certain roles, like Santos’s, are filled by political appointees, others are reserved for civil servants. Trump has already moved to reclassify some of those positions in order to be able to hire and fire employees at will, and Project 2025 — a blueprint for conservative leadership that Trump has hewed to in many ways — called for additional political-appointee positions at Census.

“You have the agencies much more wary and concerned about possible encroachments. And you have the administration much more intent on violating those norms from the very beginning,” said Erica Groshen, who served as BLS commissioner in the Obama administration. “I think that we are set up for more conflict than we’ve had in the past.”

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Over at the Labor Department, Trump’s nominee for secretary, Lori Chavez-DeRemer, is set to appear before a Senate committee next week. She must be cleared by the panel before the full Senate can take up her nomination.

The BLS is currently led by Commissioner Erika McEntarfer, who is one year into her four-year term. That role is also appointed by the president and requires Senate confirmation.

Remote Work

BLS employees, like much of the federal workforce, are still working remotely. The agency is in the middle of relocating to a new office outside of Washington, DC. It’s unclear how many of them will accept the administration’s deferred resignation offer — or whether the “buyout” is even legal.

Trump has broken protocol regarding how key reports are handled and attacked BLS data in the past. His campaign said in August that the previous administration had been “cooking the books” following the release of preliminary downward revisions to past job numbers. (Revisions are published routinely every year.)

The final revisions that came out in the jobs report Friday were more moderate. Still, Kevin Hassett, who leads the White House National Economic Council, questioned why the numbers were “way worse” looking back a year later, in an interview on Bloomberg Television.

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The U.S. data is regarded among the best in the world. By contrast, plenty of other countries have seen politics sneak into the numbers.

“We really are the gold standard, and a lot of the statistical systems in other countries look to us to hold up that gold standard,” said Paul Schroeder, executive director of the Council of Professional Associations on Federal Statistics, which is urging Congress to step in to preserve data integrity. “To lose that place in the world is absolutely devastating.”

—With assistance from Alex Tanzi.

Bloomberg.com

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