The U.S. is risking a data credibility crisis

In George Orwell’s “1984,” the Party’s ultimate act of control wasn’t surveillance or violence — it was domination over truth itself. The ability to make you say — and maybe even believe — that two plus two equals five. To “reject the evidence of your eyes and ears.” The commands weren’t about hiding the truth — they were about replacing it. In Orwell’s world, power didn’t blur the line with truth. It erased it.

That’s partially what made the White House’s recent move so concerning. When July’s weak jobs report showed just 73,000 new positions added and unemployment rising to 4.2% — on top of some serious downward revisions (258,000) to the previous two months — the political fallout was swift. President Donald Trump fired the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics — a respected, nonpartisan statistical agency — for what amounted to bad optics for the Trump administration.

Trump accused BLS Commissioner Erika McEntarfer of bias, for “faked” numbers that were “manipulated for political purposes.” Unofficially, the message was clear: Publish numbers that flatter the president, or you could be next on your way out the door. The move set off alarm bells among economists, statisticians, and investors. William Beach, a former BLS commissioner who was appointed by Trump, said plainly, “There is no way for a commissioner to rig the jobs numbers.” 

The Friends of the Bureau of Labor Statistics called the president’s rationale for firing McEntarfer “without merit” in a statement on their website and said the move “undermines the credibility of federal economic statistics that are a cornerstone of intelligent economic decision-making by businesses, families, and policymakers.” Michael Madowitz, economist at the Roosevelt Institute, echoed the broader sentiment: “Politicizing economic statistics is a self‑defeating act,” he told Reuters. “Credibility is far easier to lose than rebuild, and the credibility of America’s economic data is the foundation on which we’ve built the strongest economy in the world. Blinding the public about the state of the economy has a long track record, and it never ends well.”

But facts, it seems, are fast becoming negotiable. And once the scoreboard is up for negotiation, so is the game.

When governments treat data as a threat, it’s not just a political problem. It’s also a market one. Economic data is how nations see themselves. It’s how central banks set policy, how businesses plan hiring, how families decide whether to buy a home or wait until next year. If that mirror is cracked — or worse, covered over — the consequences go far beyond one jobs report.

When numbers get bent

The U.S. isn’t the first country to find itself testing the boundary between uncomfortable statistics and political interference. The list of cautionary tales is long — and getting longer.

Start with President Richard Nixon. In the early 1970s, facing rising inflation and a reelection campaign, Nixon pressured Federal Reserve Chair Arthur Burns to keep interest rates artificially low. But that wasn’t all. In one conversation caught on tape, Nixon asked his team to explore removing meat and eggs from the Consumer Price Index to make inflation look less threatening. The move was part of a broader pattern: Nixon’s goon squad (the so-called White House Plumbers) twisted government institutions to serve electoral goals. Even the Census Bureau faced political interference. His administration leaned on economic agencies, edited the facts, and trusted that voters would buy it. They did — at least for a while. But inflation soared again in 1974, trust in the Fed collapsed, and it took nearly a decade to repair the damage.

Then there’s Argentina. In the 2000s, as inflation spiraled upward, the Kirchner governments — of both President Néstor Kirchner and President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner — simply stopped publishing credible numbers. The national statistics agency, INDEC, was gutted. Loyalists were installed. Methodologies were rewritten in secret. Independent economists who released alternate data faced fines, intimidation, and even criminal charges. In 2013, the International Monetary Fund took the unprecedented step of formally censuring Argentina for failing to provide accurate economic data. A decade later, Argentina is still trying to rebuild public trust in its economic institutions.

China offers another model. For over a decade, the country’s reported GDP growth has clung remarkably close to its official targets — often within a few tenths of a percentage point — regardless of global or domestic shocks. In 2014, the government set a target of “around 7.5%,” and growth came in at 7.4%. In 2015, the target was lowered to 7%, and growth landed at 6.9%. Even during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, China reported a full-year growth rate of 2.3%, making it the only major economy to post growth. Analysts have long noted that China’s GDP rarely surprises — and almost never misses the mark by more than 0.1 to 0.3 percentage point. 

It’s not necessarily that the numbers are fake; it’s that no one entirely understands how they’re calculated or adjusted. Local officials have strong incentives to inflate data to meet performance quotas, and those figures are often rolled into national accounts without an external audit. The result is an economic fog. With official numbers often seen as smoothed or selectively curated, investors now turn to alternative indicators — such as satellite images of nighttime lights, freight rail volumes, and electricity consumption — to reverse-engineer China’s true economic pulse. In the absence of transparency, trust quietly exits the room.

And then there’s Turkey. President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has spent years asserting political control over the institutions meant to check him, routinely firing central bank governors and heads of the national statistics agency whenever data hasn’t conformed to his economic narrative. In 2022, that narrative broke wide open. As inflation surged, the government’s official statistics agency, TurkStat, reported annual inflation around 80–85%. But ENAG — a group of independent Turkish economists — put the true rate closer to 180%. ENAG’s data spread rapidly online and in opposition media, gaining credibility with ordinary Turks who no longer believed what the government was reporting.

Erdoğan responded the way strongmen often do: by doubling down. He dismissed central bank leaders who resisted his unorthodox insistence that high interest rates cause inflation and replaced them with loyalists. TurkStat, meanwhile, cycled through leadership, as well. Independent economists faced investigations. Some were forced out of academia or had their work blacklisted. The economic consequences were immediate. The lira collapsed. Foreign capital fled. Turkish households turned to gold and dollars to protect their savings. And investors — unsure what to believe — began pricing Turkish risk based, not on fundamentals, but on guesswork. In the absence of credible data, the markets went blind.

And Turkey, Argentina, and China are hardly alone.

In Greece, the government dramatically understated its deficit throughout the 2000s — a deception that helped the country meet eurozone entry requirements but sowed the seeds of crisis. In 2009, the newly elected government revised the official deficit upward, triggering a continent-wide panic once the truth came out. The next year, economist Andreas Georgiou was appointed to lead a newly independent statistics agency, ELSTAT. But after he reported accurate — and far higher — deficit figures, he was prosecuted for “harming the national interest.” Despite international support and backing from the IMF and Eurostat, his legal ordeal dragged on for more than a decade.

In India in 2019, top statisticians resigned over delays and distortions in GDP and unemployment data, prompting an open letter from more than 100 economists decrying political interference. In Venezuela, under Hugo Chávez and Nicolás Maduro, Venezuela stopped publishing basic economic indicators, including inflation and GDP. The government simply stopped publishing economic indicators altogether as inflation spiraled into seven digits. And in Russia, key metrics such as trade balances and energy output were blacked out after the country’s invasion of Ukraine, forcing analysts to rely on satellite and shipping data to guess at the war economy.

When truth breaks down

These stories don’t end with censured economists or doctored charts. They end with markets that stop working. In most democracies, truth is slow. It arrives with spreadsheets, footnotes, and revisions. But truth is also infrastructure — and when it breaks, the collapse isn’t loud. It’s quiet. 

And sometimes, it starts with a firing.

The BLS has always been more than just a spreadsheet factory. Its credibility doesn’t come from being right every time; it comes from being accountable, transparent, and built to withstand pressure. Methodologies are public. Revisions are expected. Career civil servants, not political appointees, put in the work. The department is part of the larger machinery of democratic capitalism — a rare place where red, white, and blue still agree on black and white. 

“Maintaining the BLS’ independence is critical,” former Labor Secretary Robert Reich wrote in an op-ed in The Guardian. “Politicizing it destroys its credibility as a reliable source of economic data ... these attacks on truth and expertise erode public trust, destabilize key institutions, and push the U.S. closer to authoritarian control.”

The BLS’ jobs report doesn’t just measure jobs or inflation. It measures reality. But if that reality becomes a moving target, the vacuum will fill. If official data becomes politicized, markets will increasingly rely on alternative indicators: ADP payrolls, LinkedIn postings, Visa spending data, Homebase shift trends, OpenTable reservations. These weren’t meant to replace the BLS — but they could begin to. These signals were once supplementary. Now, they’re forming a patchwork narrative — a private-sector approximation of economic truth. That may suffice in the short term. But it introduces inequality: those with access to better data will make better bets. Everyone else will be left in the dark.

The Data Foundation said in a statement, “Statistical independence is not dependent on any single individual but is built into the system itself through robust policies, procedures, legal frameworks, and the culture and people of the statistical system.”

In a post-trust economy, whoever owns the data owns the truth. That’s dangerous for more than just investors. When policymakers lose faith in the scoreboard, they stop listening to the refs. Central banks hesitate. Business confidence falters. Voters tune out. And if the next administration inherits data no one believes in, the path to rebuilding credibility will be long, winding, and uncertain.

It’s not too late for the U.S. (and the Trump administration) to stay on course. But once the numbers are gone, it becomes practically impossible to policy your way out of the dark.

The power of economic data lies in its ability to be believed. Without that, every number becomes a claim — and every claim a weapon. Trump’s firing of the BLS director may not rewrite July’s jobs report, but it could erase something far more valuable: the idea that reality isn’t negotiable. In Orwell’s dystopia, it wasn’t enough to accept the lie. You had to believe it. Two plus two equals five. That was the point — not to persuade, but to dominate. And once the truth becomes partisan, there’s no statistic left that can save you.