The White House is pushing a rule change that could let Donald Trump fire government economists if their numbers don’t match his political agenda.
Experts are sounding the alarm. They say this could gut the credibility of the U.S. government’s economic data—information that businesses, the Federal Reserve, and global markets depend on.
The proposed rule, quietly rolled out by the Office of Personnel Management, would allow the president to reclassify around 50,000 civil servant jobs into a new category called “policy/career.” This would strip away job protections and make it easier to fire people for so-called “poor performance or misconduct.” But critics say it’s really about silencing experts who produce inconvenient facts.
“Bureau of Labor Statistics’ leaders could be fired for releasing or planning to release jobs or inflation statistics unfavorable to the president’s policy agenda,” warned Erica Groshen, former commissioner of the BLS, in a paper urging organizations to push back on the rule.
“There are a number of changes to the civil service that make it much easier for the administration to try to interfere with the activities of the statistical agencies and that worries me,” she added in an interview cited by The Guardian.
Groshen said there’s no proof yet that Trump is already manipulating data, but this rule opens the door for exactly that.
Firing the Truth-Tellers
The U.S. has built a reputation as a country where facts—especially economic ones—matter. That reputation rests on agencies like the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) and the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA). Their data guides everything from interest rates to investment decisions.
“If the integrity of these agencies is compromised, our whole economic system is at risk,” said Groshen.
That’s not just a theory. When Argentina faked inflation numbers and Greece fudged budget data to join the euro, the fallout helped trigger deep economic crises, massive bailouts, and political chaos.
Cooking the Books?
Trump has a history of attacking data that doesn’t flatter him. When he was in office, he praised jobs numbers when they looked good—but had called them “fake” under Obama and Biden. Now, with recent GDP numbers showing contraction, Trump is once again blaming others.
“We had numbers that, despite what we were handed, we turned them around and we were getting them really turned around,” he told reporters last month, pinning the blame on Biden.
Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, a Trump ally who oversees statistical agencies, has floated changes to how GDP is calculated—changes that might make the numbers look better but would break from global standards.
Erasmus Kersting, an economics professor at Villanova University, warned of the risks. “There’s definitely an incentive to cook the books,” he said. “The Bureau of Economic Analysis would essentially need to be silenced or defunded and replaced with some other statistical agency.”
A Dangerous Precedent
Experts say undermining the country’s data systems could have long-lasting damage. Once trust is gone, it’s hard to get back.
“You can’t go back and fix it,” said Kitty Richards, a former White House official. “If you have a data series stretching back 50 years, then it gets cut for two or three years, you no longer have that 50-year data series. You’ve lost knowledge forever.”
Richards warned that attacks on data are part of a broader strategy to undermine truth itself. “We should view attacks on government data collection as hand in glove with attacks on journalism,” she said. “Undermining data collection and casting doubt on data that is released is part of a program of undermining the public’s ability to learn the truth.”
Groshen echoed that point. “In a democracy, you want to be feeding people the right information so they will make the right choices. But if the goal is to destroy democracy, you’d want to control the statistics to fit your story … you want to be promoting your own version of reality.”
The public has until May 23 to submit comments opposing the proposed rule. Experts are urging businesses, researchers, and everyday Americans to speak up—before facts themselves become optional.
