Every month, the federal government serves up a steady diet of economic reports on everything from the price of groceries to the unemployment rate. These reports are closely followed: They can move markets — and the president's approval rating.
Businesses and investors put a lot of stock in the numbers, which are rigorously vetted and free from political spin.
Now the Trump administration is calling that trust into question.
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.
At the same time, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick has suggested changing the way the broadest measure of the economy — gross domestic product — is calculated.
Those moves are raising concerns about whether economic data could be manipulated for political or other purposes.
Among those raising the alarm is Erica Groshen. She's one of the outside experts who received a terse email last week saying her services were no longer needed, because the committee she'd served on — the Federal Economic Statistics Advisory Committee — had been folded.
Groshen cares deeply about the reliability of government data, having previously overseen the number crunching as commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
"Statistical agencies live and die by trust," she says. "If the numbers aren't trustworthy, people won't use them to make important decisions, and then you might as well not publish them."
The email to Groshen, along with a note on the committee's website, said the commerce secretary had terminated the committee because its purpose had been fulfilled. A second committee that advises the government's Bureau of Economic Analysis was also discontinued.
That puzzled Groshen, who's now a senior labor market adviser at Cornell University's School of Industrial and Labor Relations. She says taking an accurate measure of a dynamic economy is an ever-evolving process.
"It is part of the mission of statistical agencies to be continually improving," Groshen says.
Changing how GDP is calculated
The email Groshen received came just days after Lutnick said he planned to alter the formula for calculating gross domestic product (GDP).
"You know the Commerce Department runs the statistics of GDP," Lutnick told Fox News. "Governments historically have messed with GDP. They count government spending as part of GDP. So I'm going to separate those two and make it transparent."
Lutnick argued that subtracting government spending from the calculation would present a more accurate picture of the economy. He appeared to echo an argument that President Trump's billionaire adviser Elon Musk made on social media, suggesting that much of what government spends money on doesn't make people's lives better.
Such a change, however, would be a major break from both long-standing practice and international standards. It could also serve to mask any negative effects of the Trump administration's spending cuts.
Trump himself has frequently challenged the government's economic data, suggesting, for example, that job gains in the Obama administration were exaggerated.
Trump and his team are happy to take credit, though, when the numbers are in their favor. Early in Trump's first term in the White House, then-press secretary Sean Spicer celebrated a rosy jobs report.
"I talked to the president prior to this, and he said to quote him very clearly," Spicer said at the time. "They may have been phony in the past, but it's very real now."
Data crunchers already face challenges
The recent Trump administration actions worry Groshen.
While she has seen no evidence of tampering with the data, she worries there could be a temptation, "either for political purposes or possibly even for financial gain," Groshen says. "So I would worry about all of those."
Even without any deliberate meddling, government number crunchers have their hands full. Fewer people are answering their surveys these days. Their budgets have steadily eroded. And some staffers have accepted the administration's offer to quit in exchange for seven months' pay.
"They've been really working on a shoestring budget," says Tara Sinclair, a professor at George Washington University's Center for Economic Research. "Now they're facing additional concerns and uncertainty about what their budgets are going to be going forward. And they've already seen staffing losses, in part because of people taking what they're calling the 'fork' emails."
Sinclair says those worries were top of mind during a panel discussion last week hosted by the National Association for Business Economics.
"Our room was standing room only," she says.
Any effort to influence the data would face pushback
Sinclair says disbanding the government's advisory committees is a "yellow caution flag," even though she believes the career staffers would protest loudly if political appointees tried to cook the books.
"If the data were manipulated, even in a small way, that will affect the credibility of our entire statistical system," she says. "And that's going to have global financial implications, because people around the world rely on the quality of U.S. economic data to make decisions."
Groshen agrees that businesspeople need reliable economic numbers to guide them when they're deciding how and when to hire or invest. She hopes they'll protest if there's any attempt to doctor the data.
"I would hope the business and financial communities would speak up loud and clear," Groshen says. "And perhaps they'll speak up now to prevent it."
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