Trustworthy US Jobs Info Is the Latest Victim of Trump’s War on Facts
Robert Reich for Inequality Media
I was instructed by my predecessors as well as by the White
House, and by every labor economist and statistician I came in contact with,
that one of my cardinal responsibilities was to guard the independence of the
Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). Otherwise, this crown jewel of knowledge
about jobs and the economy would be compromised. If politicized, it would no
longer be trusted as a source of information.
So what does Donald Trump do? With one fell swoop on August 1 he destroyed the BLS.
Trump didn’t like the fact that the BLS revised downward its jobs reports for April and May. Revisions in monthly jobs report are nothing new. They’re made when the bureau gets more or better information over time.
Yet with no basis in fact, Trump charged that Erika
McEntarfer, the commissioner of labor statistics, “rigged” the data “to make
the Republicans, and ME, look bad.” Then he ordered her fired and replaced with
someone else—presumably someone whose data Trump will approve of.
How can anyone in the future trust the data that emerges
from the Bureau of Labor Statistics when the person in charge of the agency has
to come up with data to Trump’s liking in order to stay in the job? Answer:
They cannot. Trump has destroyed the credibility of this extraordinarily
important source of information.
When Trump doesn’t like the message he shoots the messenger,
and replaces the messenger with someone who will come up with messages he
approves of.
So we’re left without credible sources of information about
what is really occurring.
Trump is in the process of trying to do the same thing with the Federal Reserve—demanding that Jerome Powell, the Fed’s chair, cut interest rates. Trump is even threatening Powell with a Trumped-up expose of Powell’s supposed extravagance in refurbishing the Fed as a means of forcing Powell to do his bidding or resign.
What happens to the Fed’s credibility if Powell give in to
Trump? It loses it. In the future, we wouldn’t have confidence that the Fed is
fighting inflation, as it should. And without that confidence, longer-term
interest rates will spike because investors will assume that there’s no
inflation cop on the beat, and therefore will demand a higher risk premium.
Trump hates facts that he disagrees with. That’s why he’s dismembering the Environmental Protection Agency, which has repeatedly shown that climate change isn’t a “hoax,” as Trump claims, but more like a national emergency.
It’s why Trump is attacking American universities, whose scientists are developing wind and solar energy, and whose historians have revealed America’s tragic history of racism and genocide of Indigenous people.
He is killing off the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the
National Institutes of Health, which are showing the sources of sickness and
disease and how we can guard against them.
This is a man and a regime that doesn’t want the public to
know the truth. He is turning America into George Orwell’s dystopian 1984.
This is what fascism looks like, friends.
We must fight this with everything we have.
© 2025 Robert Reich
Robert Reich is the Chancellor's Professor of Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley, and a senior fellow at the Blum Center for Developing Economies. He served as secretary of labor in the Clinton administration, for which Time magazine named him one of the 10 most effective cabinet secretaries of the twentieth century. His book include: "Aftershock" (2011), "The Work of Nations" (1992), "Beyond Outrage" (2012) and, "Saving Capitalism" (2016). He is also a founding editor of The American Prospect magazine, former chairman of Common Cause, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and co-creator of the award-winning documentary, "Inequality For All." Reich's newest book is "The Common Good" (2019). He's co-creator of the Netflix original documentary "Saving Capitalism," which is streaming now.
