Trump’s firing of the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics raises fears for the integrity of official statistics.
The firing of a top United States statistics official by President Donald Trump last week has drawn concerns from economists and policymakers regarding the credibility of data in the world’s biggest economy.
Trump’s dismissal of Bureau of Labor Statistics Commissioner Erika McEntarfer after the release of disappointing employment figures on Friday has raised fears over the integrity of Washington’s economic data, which are relied on by countless businesses and investors in the US and across the world.
The National Association for Business Economics warned that McEntarfer’s “baseless” ouster risked doing “lasting harm to the institutions that support American economic stability”.
“It could open the door to political meddling and certainly will undermine trust in federal statistics that businesses, policymakers and individuals use to make some of their most important decisions,” Erica Groshen, who led the Bureau of Labor Statistics under former President Barack Obama, told Al Jazeera.
