It is vital that the data produced by the BLS is accurate and dependable, and that politics plays no role in its production.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) is an American government agency tasked with collecting and disseminating a range of economic and employment data.
The BLS is responsible for two key inflation indicators: the Consumer Price Index (CPI) and the Producer Price Index (PPI).
In addition, the BLS produces national and regional figures on employment, labor force participation, productivity, and wages.
What Issues & Insights found is that BLS data appears to be influenced by politics, and has been for many years.
Issues & Insights
Yesterday, President Donald Trump nominated a high-profile critic of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, EJ Antoni, to be its new commissioner, promising on Truth Social that under his leadership “the Numbers released are HONEST and ACCURATE.”
If confirmed, Antoni, currently chief economist at the Heritage Foundation, has his work cut out for him.
Last week, we pointed out glaring mistakes the Bureau of Labor Statistics had made in recent years and asked whether its foul-ups were driven by politics or ineptitude.
The issue came to a head after President Donald Trump fired the head of the BLS in the wake of its massive revisions to the two previous months jobs reports, in which it admitted to overcounting the number of jobs created by more than 250,000. Trump responded by saying the numbers were rigged.
The press, naturally, rushed to defend the bureaucrats, saying that revisions are normal and there’s nothing to get worked up about. The BLS routinely revises its initial monthly jobs estimate – based on a survey of 100,000 employers – over the next two months as more data come in. No biggie.
Is that true? We decided to find out and reviewed the BLS’s monthly jobs data going back to 2009. What we found was deeply troubling.
We compared its initial report on jobs each month to the actual figures released months later. Our conclusion: its initial jobs reports have been absolutely and completely unreliable for years – often wildly optimistic or wildly pessimistic – regardless of who was president. (See the table below.)
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