Trump could tamper with government data to make his administration look better, ex-official warns

With Donald Trump taking over the government for a second time with grandiose promises to reshape the federal government, he will be in a strong position to install loyalists who may be willing to fiddle with data that experts rely on to assess the economy. Such a shake-up would cripple the state's ability to fulfill even its most basic obligations — and transform it into an instrument of political power, a former high-ranking civil servant warned in an interview with Salon.

Rising costs of living has been at the top of many Americans' minds, and one key source of information for them has been the national inflation rate produced by the Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics. The inflation rate, along with job creation numbers, census data and other statistics produced by federal civil servants, not only gives the public insight on the state of the economy in hard numbers, but also informs federal decision-making from routine duties to crisis situations.

With President-elect Donald Trump widely expected to revive the "Schedule F" employment category, which would expose thousands of federal employees to easy dismissal, former Commissioner of the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics Erica L. Groshen said that such a proposal would have devastating effects on the government's statistics infrastructure and erode public trust.

"Senior civil servants would now be vulnerable to being fired for political reasons, and have pressures on them to do things that would violate the norms that protect trust," she told Salon.

The employees who work at the Department of Labor Statistics and other statistics bureaus  are nearly always professional civil servants, their work normally protected from political interference by a number of safeguards. The secretary of any given department, for example, cannot see data before it is released, except under special arrangements, which are Memorandums of Understanding, or MOUs, available for the public to see in any case.

But Trump has accused government statistics agencies, along with other components of the so-called bureaucratic "deep state," of manipulating data for political ends. In August 2024, he pounced on a jobs report revision to claim that the Department of Labor Statistics had purposely inflated job growth to allow Democrats to "say what a wonderful job they're doing" and were now only releasing the revision because the real data had already been leaked by a "Patriot."

When Trump was in office in 2019, the Labor Department issued a similar revision without the then-president raising any hackles. Now that Trump is returning to the White House with a vow to restructure the administrative state, experts have expressed concern over just how much it will be transformed into an extension of his political whims.

Under politicized statistics agencies, Groshen explained, policymakers could pressure civil servants to speed up or delay release dates, depending on their agenda; arbitrarily change statistical methods; replace career experts with unqualified or unbiased candidates; and grant earlier special access to data for non-political purposes, such as personal enrichment, political advantage or enforcement activities.

Any one of these things could severely impact the government's ability to perform its most basic functions.

"Federal statistics are information infrastructure for our economy. They promote good evidence based decision making in many, many spheres, and are mechanism for us to jointly decide on what are the public goods — roads, national defense, clean air — that we need, and to then make sure that we have them so that our country functions effectively," Groshen said. "Without impartial data on poverty rates, the government wouldn't be able to efficiently allocate money to fight poverty; the same applies to unemployment insurance programs based on local unemployment rates, or apportionment of congressional seats based on census data, or any number of other functions."

The revival and potential abuse of Schedule F could destroy trust in the system among the general public as well as organizations in a contractual relationship with the federal government; the latter would include manufacturers whose contracts include inflation-proof escalation clauses and unions in collective bargaining agreements. The erosion of credibility would potentially force the government to waste time renegotiating shorter-term contracts and deter organizations from working with them at all.

Lawmakers would also be wary of using information provided by a compromised system to guide their policy-making. The result could be a slew of federal programs that are "based on lawmakers' thoughts about where the problems are and what sectors need relief," Groshen said, rather than on professional sources of data. American citizens making personal and business decisions would also be left without a clear sense of where they can obtain reliable information, and might rely on alternative sources of information like social media that "are not transparent, have no history, and could be produced by someone with an agenda."

"There's now the risk of a world where you have more industrial unrest between workers and employers, more protracted and continual negotiations about a lot of things that are now handled pretty smoothly, more uncertainty in financial markets — and financial markets hate uncertainty, so higher interest rates because people feel more uncertain — more spending on lawyers and negotiators, and generally conflict both in the public and private sector," she said.

Groshen and other critics have warned that if the Trump White House uses Schedule F to clear out the federal bureaucracy, the government would lose institutional expertise that, along with trust, would be extremely difficult to replace. For some advisors with Trump's ear, that's exactly the point.