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In 1937, Olimpiy Kvitkin, a statistician, was executed by firing squad. His crime? Producing inconvenient census numbers, which showed the Soviet Union contained about 6 million fewer residents than Joseph Stalin had claimed, probably because of that teensy-tiny famine the country had just been through. Oops.
We’re (thankfully) not at that penal stage yet. But as U.S. economic data turn south, the Trump administration has increasingly lashed out at our own federal statistical agencies. This week’s newsletter looks at how purges and funding cuts have been compromising the reliability and integrity of federal data, and making it harder for those of us who rely on these numbers to assess the world around us. Tracking threats to the integrity of federal statistics is one of my hobbyhorses (see this ginormous running thread here), so if there’s a development you think I should know about, please drop me a line.
If you like dorking out on numbers then I would encourage you to become a Bulwark+ member—we can dork out together.
–Catherine
Trump’s One Weird Trick for Eliminating Bad News: Delete It
The disappearance of inconvenient facts and the remaking of reality.
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HOW DO YOU ERADICATE hunger, STDs, illiteracy, poverty?
It’s actually quite simple. You stop measuring them.
The government shutdown that just concluded left the country in something of a data blackout. Some major economic data releases have been delayed (like the September jobs report, which belatedly came out today), and others canceled altogether (the October jobs report, which will never be released). This has made it unusually difficult for U.S. businesses and the Federal Reserve to assess how well the economy is doing.
But if you assume the reopening of the government has put an end to these challenges, think again. The real threat to our understanding of the U.S. economy, and the country’s health writ large, is not that measly, six-week shutdown fight. It’s the fact that the Trump administration has been quietly snuffing out thousands of other data series, particularly those that might produce politically inconvenient results.
Take for example President Donald Trump’s boasts about bringing more international investment into the United States.¹ He extracted pledges from Switzerland and South Korea. Just this week, he boasted of a whopping $1 trillion in blood money from Saudi Arabian Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (as my colleague Andrew Egger notes, the Saudi investment jumped from $600 billion to $1 trillion in the course of a few minutes and would, if real, amount to an absurd chunk of the country’s GDP).
But fulfillment of such pledges is notoriously fickle; in the past, plenty of foreign companies and governments have promised big investments in U.S. factories and jobs that never materialized, generating bad headlines for the politicians who wrangled them. Fortunately for Trump, these pledges will become increasingly un-fact-checkable.
That’s because yesterday, to relatively little fanfare, ...
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