America Will Suffer From Trump’s Assault on Facts

The old Soviet Union was notorious for pumping out false information to make it appear the regime's economic policies and programs were successful.  Just about everyone, including much of the Soviet population knew the data and statistics were cooked and edited to depict a reality that was not true.  Under the Felon's regime were are seeing a similar war on facts and objective reality. In addition the regime is seeking to defund research - ranging from climate change research and data collection to vaccine research - and and programs that produce data that shows the  regime's failings and/or display a real world that counters the regime's ideology.  With the Felon's attack on the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the firing of its director, the Felon is sending a message to the world that economic and other data that is essential to the financial markets and would be foreign investment - which the Felon claims to want - are going to be untrue and unreliable.  The result will potentially less foreign investment and a degrading of U.S. government bonds.  Meanwhile, here at home many will find it ever more difficult to know the truth about the economy, climate change, product safety and a host of other issues. A main editorial in the New York Times looks at where Americans find themselves:

President Trump [The Felon] treats facts in the same way that he treats people: He expects them to line up in support of his goals, and if they don’t, he seeks to get rid of them.

Last week Mr. Trump was confronted by the inconvenient truth that job growth has been in a three-month slump. A more grounded president might have considered whether the data raised questions about his agenda. Mr. Trump characteristically insisted that the questions were about the data. He charged that the beige functionaries of the Bureau of Labor Statistics were engaged in a conspiracy to discredit his administration, and he fired the head of the bureau. The firing is so clearly damaging to the credibility of the federal government that it drew objections from some Senate Republicans.

Mr. Trump’s allegations against Erika McEntarfer, the longtime public servant whom he summarily fired, have no foundation in reality. . . . . Experts, including past leaders of the agency nominated by presidents from both parties, said that it was effectively impossible for the bureau’s leader to manipulate those numbers.

But there is no doubt that Mr. Trump’s actions will cast a shadow over the rest of the government that he leads. Public servants must now do their work while fearing that they may be fired merely for producing information that displeases the president [Felon]. Mr. Trump is also making it harder for the government to obtain information, as people and businesses asked to respond to questions now have reason to doubt whether the answers will be accurately reported.

The reality is that Mr. Trump’s actions will create the very problem he claims to be fixing. Instead of improving the quality of information gathered and reported by the government, he is sowing doubts about the ability of federal agencies to produce reliable data. And in doing so, he is leaving Americans ever more reliant on whatever he declares to be the truth.

The production and dissemination of reliable information is an important government service. The decisions Americans make, from whether to wear a raincoat to which medicines to take and which investments to make, are often shaped by federal data.

Countries that fudge statistics are basically lying to themselves, and they suffer the consequences, as Ben Casselman documented in a recent analysis in The Times. Greece understated its fiscal deficits for years, even prosecuting an official who insisted on reporting the actual figures — lies that contributed to a crippling debt crisis beginning in 2009. Argentina became so well known for undercounting inflation that investors were left to assume the worst, driving up the country’s borrowing costs. Authoritarian regimes have long published rosy data that conceals and deepens the immiseration of their populations.

The Trump administration, blind to this history, is engaged in an increasingly wide-ranging effort to erase data or to prevent the collection of new data that contradicts its political agenda. It has proposed to defund the Hawaiian observatory that has measured the rise of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere since 1958. It shut down a national database created to track misconduct by federal police officers. It removed from the website of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention the results of the Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System, a long-running study of adolescent behaviors — including sleep, sexual activity and substance abuse — and then, after a court blocked the decision, reposted the data with a note insisting that much of it wasn’t accurate.

One of Mr. Trump’s most powerful political techniques is to seize on problems as the justification for his destructive policies.

The bureau does face challenges. It relies on a monthly survey of approximately 60,000 households at a time when people are harder to reach and less willing to participate in surveys of any kind. The agency needs to work harder to gather the same amount of data, but Congress has repeatedly refused its requests for additional funding. As a result, the bureau has been forced to rely increasingly on other sources of information to impute what is happening in the job market.

Dr. McEntarfer said last year that the agency, without more funding, might need to remove 5,000 households from its survey, which would further reduce the quality of its estimates.

A president concerned about the quality of the jobs data ought to be focused on addressing those problems. Mr. Trump, however, isn’t proposing to provide more funding or to improve the agency’s methods. He is not interested in how many jobs the American economy will produce this month. In firing Dr. McEntarfer, Mr. Trump made clear that he doesn’t want to know the answer.