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, the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis announced it was discontinuing some of its data collection on foreign investment in the United States as part of its “ongoing streamlining initiatives.” This follows previous announcements from the BEA in recent months about how it was paring back other data collection on foreign direct investment due to “resource constraints.”
In the absence of data, I guess we’ll simply have to trust Trump when he says that he’s delivered.
Now, do I think Trump directed the BEA to eliminate these measures specifically to make it easier for him to bullshit about his dealmaking prowess? Not exactly. While there are some cases where the administration has leaned on statistical agencies or explicitly censored their findings, the more common and less visible tactic has been to just defund them.
Trump’s fiscal year 2026 budget request for the Bureau of Economic Analysis reflects a 20 percent reduction compared to last year, a target that agency staff have told me they’ve already hit thanks to DOGE cuts, early retirements, and hiring freezes. (The comms team at BEA—like most statistical agency press offices I’ve contacted in recent months—has declined to confirm or deny these numbers.) This has forced the BEA to make tough choices. The agency also is responsible for producing much higher-profile, market-moving data, such as the reports on GDP, consumer spending, and the Federal Reserve’s preferred measure of inflation. Something had to give, and this week, that something was data on foreign investment.
Other major statistical agencies are struggling with their own brain drains and funding cuts.
Take the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which releases data on the job market and prices, among other marquee measures. In August, Trump’s decision to fire Erika McEntarfer, the BLS commissioner, grabbed headlines,2 but the top job is hardly the only hole this administration has blown in that agency. At the time of McEntarfer’s firing, a third of senior BLS leadership positions were already vacant. (That’s still the case, in fact.)
The rest of the agency has been swiss-cheesed too. Some regional field offices—such as the consumer price index offices in Buffalo, New York; Lincoln, Nebraska; and Provo, Utah—have been shuttered entirely. Meanwhile, post-COVID, the agency was already struggling with reduced survey-response rates, which have made its numbers noisier and more susceptible to big revisions. The administration’s response has been to disband the task force working to fix these problems.
The result is that federal data are being degraded—or deleted altogether. And deletion is especially common when statistical series measure issues that this administration would rather not track.
In September, for instance, the administration canceled a three-decade-old annual survey that measures how many Americans struggle to get enough food. A few months earlier, HHS eliminated the team that produces the poverty guidelines, which determine how we count the number of people in poverty and eligibility for benefits such as SNAP, Medicaid, Head Start, and childcare subsidies. But hey, if you never determine who’s eligible for benefits, maybe that means no one is.
Over the past ten months, I’ve been tracking similar cuts to federal data collection on substance abuse, natural disasters, children’s literacy, climate change, race, crime, immigration, gender identity and other issues. (My non-exhaustive, running list lives here; please send me examples I may have missed.)
Lots of people might take these numbers for granted, but we’ll notice when they’re gone. We need these data to interpret the world around us and make decisions. Consumers use them to track the weather, determine where to send their kids to school, and negotiate raises. Businesses use them to hire, invest, price, and purchase. Doctors use them to diagnose illnesses. Public officials use them to craft policy.3 And voters use them to determine whether their elected officials are keeping their promises.
But instead of recognizing the usefulness of these data—or perhaps because he recognizes it—the president has chosen to curate his own reality.
As was the case last week, when the White House cheerily announced that inflation had fallen because DoorDash’s breakfast offerings had gotten cheaper, and because Walmart had shrinkflationed its Thanksgiving dinner deal. Maybe this seemed forgivable when government agencies were shut down and everyone was looking for alternative measures to fill the statistical void. My fear is that the voids are multiplying.
1 Boosting foreign direct investment in the United States is a somewhat bizarre thing for Trump to fixate on, since higher FDI mathematically increases our trade deficits. Which Trump believes are already catastrophically high. But whatever, not like Trump has a Wharton degree.
3 “I would not want anyone to think the data have deteriorated to a point where it’s difficult for us to understand the economy,” Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell said in a June Senate hearing. “But the direction of travel is concerning.”
Catherine Rampell is economics editor at The xxxxxx and an anchor at MS NOW (fmrly MSNBC). She specializes in econ, politics, public policy, immigration. Previously at WaPo, NYT, CNN, PBS NewsHour.
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