President Donald Trump decides fire PhD Erika MecentarferA dismal work report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) last Friday attracted criticism not only from his usual opponents, but also from his allies.
Stephen Moore, former economic adviser to President Donald Trump, told wealth When he did that shot, he was similar to “firing the referee because you don’t like the way the game is.”
“I’m not here to defend Trump,” Moore is also a Trump candidate for the Fed’s governor. “But I do think he should have fired her a long time ago because the numbers that have come out over the past few years are just not accurate specifications for what’s really going on in the economy.”
Trump was angry at McKenstall after the new report drastically revised U.S. job data for May and June, thus cutting about 258,000 jobs. Revised composition maximum Over nearly 60 years, the number of jobs has declined.
president Write In Friday’s Truth Social Jobs, McEntarfer, appointed by the Biden administration, reported political gains. He said he would replace her with “a person who is more capable.”
Transition from survey data
While Moore disagrees with the manipulation of these numbers, he agrees with Trump that the BLS needs a new “Mr. Repair” to lead the agency. He said that in his 40 years of economic research, he had never seen these jobs become so unreliable.
Moore said recent economic data are plagued by the same problems as political voting data: No one wants to pick up the phone, Moore said. Monthly work reports depend heavily on surveys of businesses and families that work when everyone uses landline phones but are less reliable in the digital age.
“The process of using BLS is 75 years old,” Moore added. “They need to be completely modified.”
The pandemic seems to accelerate the trend of people ignoring voters’ calls. Before 2020 Response rate The survey for the current employment statistics survey (BLS uses to compile monthly employment reports) is about 60%. After that, it dropped to 45%.
A few days before Trump fired McEnfarter letter Requesting funding from Congress to modernize the data collection process.
Economists believe that agencies need space and money to “recover” survey response rates while also trying new ways of collecting data.
“Transitioning to a system where less survey data is mixed with more administrative and private sector data while preserving data integrity and privacy standards is a generational important task facing statistical agencies today,” the economists wrote.
But San Francisco Fed researchers Research Earlier this year, the survey’s responsiveness found that although the response rate dropped, it would not necessarily lead to average revisions to reports such as monthly work reports.
Claire Mersol, economist at BLS, Tell this Wall Street Journal Many revisions to previous numbers are part of the “routine recalculation of seasonal factors.”
“Usually, monthly revisions have offset movements within the industry, where one is up and one is down,” Melsol said. “In June, most revisions were negative.”
In other words, huge negative revisions may just be opportunities.
Even if the data becomes increasingly unreliable, some Republican allies of the president say firing the BLS chief would not help to solve the problem. Senator Rand Paul, a Republican from Kentucky, Tell NBC News He questioned how the move would improve the accuracy of BLS.
“I’m going to look at it, but the first thing to say is that by firing someone counting, you can’t really make the numbers different or better,” he said.
Senator Lisa Murkowski, a Republican from Alaska, said she distrusts the numbers, but the move made the situation worse.
“When you fire people, it makes people trust them more,” she said.
