I spent much of the 1990s as the secretary of labor. One unit of the labor department is the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
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.
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? In one fell swoop on Friday, he essentially destroyed the credibility of the BLS.
Trump didn’t like the fact that the BLS revised downward its jobs reports for April and May.
Well, that’s too bad. Revisions in monthly jobs reports are nothing new. They’re made when the bureau gets more or better information over time, which it often does.
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 information 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 that he approves. 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 with the Federal Reserve – demanding that Jerome Powell, the Fed’s chair, cut interest rates or lose control of the agency.
What happens to the Fed’s credibility if Powell gives in to Trump? It loses it.
In the future, we wouldn’t have confidence that the Fed is fighting inflation as rigorously 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 the climate crisis 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 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 the US into George Orwell’s dystopian 1984.
The Trumping of America is happening so fast and in so many places that it’s hard to see the whole. Which partly explains why he doesn’t want the facts out. He doesn’t want us to know how bad it really is.
Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is a professor of public policy emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley. He is a Guardian US columnist. His newsletter is at robertreich.substack.com. His next book, Coming Up Short: A Memoir of My America, will be out on 5 August
