This may be one of the more ominous moves in a deeply troubling environment. Trump officials killed a low-cost statistical advisory committee at the Department of Commerce. This could be the beginning of a trend where MAGA is free to doctor economic data. Remember how Trump used to complain that he didn’t trust the government data, produced by nonpartisan statistical agencies like the Bureau of Labor Statistics? In the future, government data will be produced by MAGA partisans. Will we get regular reports showing that everything is great and getting better every day? Will statisticians who tell the truth be fired?

The title of the article is: “The War on Government Statistics Has Quietly Begun.”

Claudia Sahm is the chief economist at New Century Advisors and a former Federal Reserve economist. She is the creator of the Sahm rule, a recession indicator.

Claudia Sahm writes in Bloomberg News:

In a time of great economic uncertainty, President Donald Trump’s administration quietly took a step last week that could create even more: Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick disbanded the Federal Economic Statistics Advisory Committee.

I realize that the shuttering of an obscure statistical advisory committee may not strike anyone as a scandal, much less an outrage. But as an economist who has presented to the committee, known as FESAC, I know how it improved the information used by both the federal government and private enterprise to make economic decisions. Most Americans do not realize how many aspects of their lives rely on timely and accurate government data.

One of FESAC’s official responsibilities was “exploring ways to enhance the agencies’ economic indicators to make them timelier, more accurate, and more specific to meeting changing demands and future data needs.” In the complex and highly dynamic US economy, this is an ongoing effort — not a one-time task that has been “fulfilled,” which was the Commerce Department’s stated reason for terminating the committee.

The 15 members of the advisory committee, who were unpaid, brought deep technical expertise on economic measurement from the private sector, academia and the non-profit world. They were a sounding board for the Census Bureau, Bureau of Labor Statistics, and Bureau of Economic Analysis, which produce much of the nation’s official statistics.

If statistics fail to keep up with the changing economy, they lose their usefulness. When the committee last met in December, one focus was on measuring the use and production of artificial intelligence. Staff from the agencies shared existing findings on AI, such as from the Business Trends and Outlook Survey that began in 2022, and outlined new data collection efforts. AI’s current use among businesses has nearly doubled since late 2023, and even more businesses expect to adopt AI in the next six months.