Trump’s Firing of BLS Head Called “Tragedy” by Ball State Director
MUNCIE, Ind. (WISH) — One of Indiana’s leading economists is sharply criticizing President Donald Trump’s decision to fire the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS).
“I just think it’s a tragedy,” said Michael Hicks, Director of Ball State’s Center for Business and Economic Research, in an interview on WISH-TV’s Daybreak. “Because here in the United States … once you start having doubts about the veracity of our data, then people are going to say, ‘Well, I’m still going to invest in the United States, but I’m also going to look somewhere else. I’m going to slowly move my investment elsewhere.’”
The president removed Biden appointee Erika McEntarfer hours after the release of the July jobs report, which showed that hiring had slowed for the month. The report also contained large revisions to the May and June numbers.
Trump later posted that the numbers were “rigged” to make him look bad. Hicks says the process doesn’t work that way.
“The fact is these data come in, and they’re reported right out of the bin. So there’s not a mechanism for manipulating them,” Hicks contends. “And if they were, all these BLS economists would be leaking this information to the media … There’s zero evidence of bias and some evidence that they’ve been ruthlessly nonpartisan over the last few years.”
Asked to predict the fallout of McEnfarter’s removal, Hicks offers a bleak outlook, beginning with investors hedging their bets by investing less in America.
“That will cause interest rates to rise, borrowing costs for the federal government, and that will bleed over into borrowing costs for households, for mortgage interest payments,” Hicks said. “If you’re trying to buy a car, this sort of shenanigans leads to higher interest rates down the road. And so Americans are really at risk of paying out of pocket for this petulant anger at a very transparent statistical process.”
He also says it undermines faith the system moving forward by making people question whether the numbers across the economic calendar are accurate.
“I hope that the president and his staff realize how big a mistake this was and we get legitimate numbers,” he says. “It was bad, very bad public policy and a bad political mistake on the part of the president.”
