Trump orders firing of labor stats chief after data showed jobs growth slowed
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
For many, this will feel like a defensible move or a minor mistake. If the public discourse is corrupted, the public will be corrupted. And so the whole house will come down, just as intended.
Sure, you expect the numbers to change as more data comes in. But...that's a pretty big misoverestimate. This is very problematic, as it actually MASKED some of the ill effects which Trump's policies have had.
Who knows if Trump would have actually moderated his policies if he had had a more accurate read sooner, but private companies rely on this data as well, and no doubt they have made decisions they wouldn't have if they had know the true numbers.
Trump certainly was mean-spirited in trying to frame this as a partisan issue, and downright disingenuous in some of his accusations. Nevertheless, >250,000 jobs everybody thought were there but weren't....yeah, that's a firing offense.
Recall, her job wasn't to predict how many jobs would be created. Her job was to measure how many jobs were created.
Yeah, I'm sorry, but a plus-or-minus 250,000 margin of error is just too high. We have every right to expect more accurate measurements than that.
Instead, the read he got seemed to indicate that he wasn't hurting employment at all.
We have to be careful not to overstate our case. If we just complain indiscriminately about everything Trump does, nobody will or should take us seriously.
The understandable mistake is wanting to interpret the regime like it is something like a natural, healthy part of society, a rule-abiding, constructive force seeking win-wins, seeking broader support, seeking consensus. It isn't, and the failing to highlight that it is the failing of the 4th estate.
There is electorate and there is selectorate. The people in power all knew what was coming; the outrage is just circus. The people that decide over Trump do not have such things as "jobs", it is not a concern at all. Even an economic crash won't affect them.
Absolute bullshit, because everybody was saying this all along.
"More than 5.6 million jobs could be at risk due to Trump’s latest economic policies" April 9th, https://www.forbes.com/sites/rachelwells/2025/04/09/what-job...
"A new report by Goldman Sachs examining how President Donald Trump's tariffs will impact the labor market [...] found that would lead to a net negative impact on employment across the economy" April 15th, https://www.foxbusiness.com/economy/how-trumps-tariffs-could...
"How Trump's Metal Tariffs Could Eliminate 75x More US Jobs Than They Save" February 11th, https://www.investopedia.com/metal-tariffs-cost-at-least-75-...
"In recent days, some trade associations and labor unions voiced warnings about tariff-related job losses." February 4th, https://abcnews.go.com/Business/trump-tariffs-canada-mexico-...
"President Donald Trump’s plan to impose a 25% tariff on all imported aluminum could cost 100,000 American jobs" February 25th, https://edition.cnn.com/2025/02/25/economy/trump-aluminum-ta...
You have to live in some alternate reality to think otherwise. Brace for the actual, very real, consequences of an economy where the numbers no longer command trust.
In this case, large corporations weren't hurt as much, little companies were hurt a lot more.
So the reports of bad news came in late.
"LS surveys firms in the payrolls survey over the course of three months, gaining a more complete picture as more businesses respond. But a smaller share of firms are responding to the first poll. Initial collection rates have repeatedly slid below 60% in recent months — down from the roughly 70% or more that was the norm before the pandemic.
Statistical agencies have also struggled with tighter budgets and staffing constraints, which have only grown more acute in the Trump administration.
“We are seeing these cuts to funding for government agencies affect their ability to collect and analyze economic data,” said Gregory Daco, chief economist at EY-Parthenon. “And for all of the reports that the Bureau of Labor Statistics is conducting, there is likely to be more volatility going forward."[0]
I will try to be not too snarky, but imagine what would happen if the president announces tariffs every other day then changing it on the next, creating extreme volatility and uncertainty for investors. Imagine what would happen if the president threatens allies with war of conquest. If he causes the dollar to tumble while tanking the bond markets. If he daily threatens to blow up the last public instance in the US that employs a modicum of integrity and competence.
Imagine how high the pressure would have been in the past months to paint rosy pictures and suppress bad news all around. And yet people keep falling for the dumb narratives.
Imagine how difficult it is to do economic projections when inflation is not recorded anymore. Instead the US public get inflation data as vibes now, as things are probably expected to develop so badly that even the corporate media rooms might not be able to downplay it enough. People might get tired hearing of Biden's age.
The cluster fuck is all self-made. On purpose.
But her job wasn't to predict the number of jobs created, her job was to measure the number of jobs created. That is something you should be able to do more accurately than a plus-or-minus 250,000 margin of error.
You just lie, how all the Trump suppoerters lie.
Interestingly enough, the current 90% CI for the month is about 270k jobs:
https://www.bls.gov/charts/employment-situation/otm-employme...
Note that the 250k revision includes both May and June. Is that a lot? Yes, considering that the average monthly estimation error over the past 20 years was about 51k jobs:
https://www.bls.gov/web/empsit/cesnaicsrev.htm#2024
Could have they done better? Nobody can tell after only a few hours from the announcement.
If you do have concrete and constrictive concerns about the methodology, feel free to point them out. Here's their handbook for your convenience:
https://www.bls.gov/web/empsit/cesnaicsrev.htm
it gives historical data for how big the revisions have been. Looks like historically, the revisions have been at least an order of magnitude or two less than 250,000. In fact to get revisions anywhere near that large, you have to go back to April of 2020. Which was when the whole world was going bananas because of COVID.
Unless I'm reading the data wrong (always a possibility) it really does seem like a 250,000 downward revision, to like 17,000, a two-order-of magnitude miss, does seem to be anomalous.
Generally, it seems that estimation post-covid became less accurate, with five (if I'm counting correctly) revisions of 100k or more since 2022, excluding the latest two. I imagine this is because covid messed up the numbers for the seasonal adjustment.
Do note that the reported standard errors are about 83k/70k for first/second estimates (tables 3/4 at https://www.bls.gov/web/empsit/cesvarae.htm), meaning that deviations of up to ~133k/112k in either direction from the true value are expected at a confidence of 90%.
Overall, my conclusion is that these revisions are higher than normal, but not unexpected if you dig into the numbers.
sigh What do I know. My point is that probably any president would be displeased if the numbers they had been bragging about for a few quarters came in orders of magnitude worse. And any president would probably ask the question of whether the right person had the job.
Trump massively politicized the issue, in his typical very nasty and mean-spirited way. Shockingly indecorous. But we can't just reflexively attribute malice to every thing Trump does. We will lose all credibility of we overreach and overstate our case.
It got harder to estimate, because less people reply to the survey (see sibling comment). They are aware of this and they could improve their analysis and data collection methods with more funding and staff, but have been facing challenges for years and the actions of the current administration certainly did not help:
"The government recently disbanded two outside advisory committees that used to consult on the numbers, offering suggestions on ways to improve the reliability of the government data." March 11th, https://www.npr.org/2025/03/11/nx-s1-5323155/economic-data-r...
> any president would be displeased if the numbers they had been bragging about for a few quarters
These numbers came with uncertainty estimates that covered the possibility of such a large revision. But this was not taken into account. Again, basic numeracy required to interpret poll results.
> But we can't just reflexively attribute malice to every thing Trump does.
Malice or incompetence I agree, which is why we dug deep and found:
1. Numbers came with uncertainty estimates that were ignored;
2. Data from the last few years was less informative than usual because fewer people respond to polls;
3. Recent cuts to budget and personnel made it even more difficult to improve data collection and analysis.
W.R.T. #1: I put it to you that if the margin of error is two or three orders of magnitude greater than the value reported as being measured, its not really a measurement, or even an estimate. If I told my foreman, "yeah, I need either 3 more feet of lumber or 300 more feet of lumber to finish framing this house" have given him a measurement, or even an estimation?
It was her job to deliver a measurement (we'll come around to whether she was given enough resources, etc I promise!) But that was her job. Looking at the July numbers, the reported number is 73k jobs, and the error bars are between -63k to 209k. An order of magnitude larger than the reported number? Did she really do her job? Did she really give us any information at all?
W.R.T #2: Sure, people are not responding to polls so much. You could even make a case that this is partly because of Trump's policies: they probably don't want ICE busting into the workplace and chunking their new employees into a concentration camp--best just not to report hiring anybody at all.
But as times change, the means and methods must also change. If the polls are no longer accurate enough, a new method of measurement must be found. Why not, say, scrape social media to see how many people talk about getting a new job or getting laid off. Or just buy the data.
It's scary how much social media companies know about us. I'll bet Zuckerberg has a pretty durn accurate number of how many jobs were created in July.
W.R.T. #3: Yes, again, Trump's policies have made her job way harder. But tell me, is there any CEO or business owner who isn't faced with the problem of trying to do more with less? Intel just fired Pat Gelsinger (one of the few executives who is so talented that I would blindly follow him into the Gates of Hell), because he couldn't do enough more with less. Personally, I think the board was wrong, but there's no reason to think the board is corrupt or evil.
The whole history of humanity is being pressured to do more with less--which is another way of saying that we have continually challenged ourselves to become more and more productive so that we can have better and better lives.
Now, Trump is a very bad manager, and he very well have "misunderestimated" the amount of resources she needed. Please understand, I'm not saying that Trump's incompetence has nothing to do with why he fired her. Perhaps he did set her up to fail, but it could very well have been done because of incompetence and not malfeasence.
What I am saying is that comments like the one I originally replied to, which claim that this is transparently a case of government corruption, etc etc, are not necessarily so. Trump has spun this as a case of government corruption, certainly for the purposes of covering his own backside on this, but what I'm saying is perhaps we shouldn't just take Trump's word for it as to why this happened. He said what he said to get BOTH left AND right to jump to the conclusion he wanted us to.
We certainly shouldn't take the bait which Trump has offered us, to just further drive a wedge between us, get us to reflexively hate everything the other side does, immediately just assume the worst of each other, etc etc. As long as they can keep us divided, they can keep us conquered.
With enough resources one could know the exact number without any margin of error. This number could however be the result of random fluctuations rather than systematic effects such as policies or natural phenomena. Only the latter are interesting, because you do not want to take decisions based on random noise. While some sources of noise can be eliminated, for example by polling more people, other types of noise are just there and are inherent of the process you are measuring. Wide confidence intervals also convey this kind of information, and more advanced statistical analyses can separate these two fundamental sources of noise. Those who care no doubt are informed.
Speaking of real-world relevance, there are about 159M people employed, so a confidence interval of 270k means that you can statistically detect changes larger than 0.17% within a month, and a CI of 70k after three months reveals changes of 0.04% or more. Since policy changes need time to propagate around the economy, at least one and perhaps two quarters, I would imagine that data for the immediately preceding month is not critical. Given the budget challenges in the last years, one could speculate that decision makers in the government were generally satisfied with this level of accuracy. And if they are not, sacking people does not change how statistics works.
Speaking of Trump: actions speak louder than words, and history remains a good teacher. I won't go any further since I am not American, I can only hope you guys get your shit together.
"LS surveys firms in the payrolls survey over the course of three months, gaining a more complete picture as more businesses respond. But a smaller share of firms are responding to the first poll. Initial collection rates have repeatedly slid below 60% in recent months — down from the roughly 70% or more that was the norm before the pandemic."[0]
One idea would be to scrape data off of social media sites, or just buy the data from Palantir or something. I'll bet Zuckerberg has a very accurate number of how many jobs were created last quarter.
I'm sure any president from any party would not be happy with employment numbers which were essentially useless. Trump said what he said to get BOTH left and right sides to jump to opposite conclusions. Lets not take the bate.
OH NO....a 0.15% error (total # of jobs in the US is ~163 million). Revisions of this scale are absolutely normal and have been going on as long as I've been paying attention to job/unemployment statistics. Instead of all-caps-ing absolute numbers, did you pause to ask yourself what kind of relation these revisions have to the standard deviation? I don't understand why you'd come to a site like HN that's full of data scientists and highly numerate folk and then post 'BIG NUMBER!' as sufficient justification.
Really enjoyed this (login only) post:
> The Nazi comparisons are useful, but the Trump instinct to address negative outcomes by firing and silencing anyone on their team foolish enough to report them always makes me think of Mao and the Great Famine.
https://bsky.app/profile/joekatz45.bsky.social/post/3lvem6co...
Sure why not both? But the dogma of dear leader ism & willingness to have the facts be what they say you are, to habitually step on experts & spread distrust (using a sharpie on the hurricane predictions) is something seriously enjoying huffing it's own farts.
Perhaps the dumbest thing about Trump’s dictatorial firing of the person in charge of these numbers is the fact that downward revisions work in his favor because most people don’t pay attention to them. They just pay attention to the current release. The numbers for May and June looked good when they came out and no one would have been talking about the revised had it not been for his temper tantrum.
In fact, Trump accused the Biden administration (on Truth Social) of using this as a way to hide bad numbers from the public back in August 2024 - release good numbers and quietly revise later. Now he’s claiming that it’s being used against him. What’s really going on is he knows the economic shitstorm from his idiotic tariffs is about to begin and he will need to control the narrative. Unfortunately for him, this is about to spiral way out of his ability to control.