President Donald Trump reacted to Friday's disastrous jobs report by firing the director of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, baselessly claiming this data had been fabricated by anti-MAGA forces to make him look bad.
But this freakout is even more embarrassing given that a task force had been working to improve BLS data accuracy, and the Trump administration disbanded it, conservative National Review writer Dominic Pino explained in a lengthy thread posted to X.
"Mad about jobs report inaccuracy?" wrote Pino. "One reason it has gotten harder in recent years is declining survey response rates. There was an unpaid advisory group of statistical experts that was working on solving that problem at its last meeting... before Howard Lutnick disbanded it."
This group, known as the Federal Economic Statistics Advisory Committee, "was established in 1999 to advise the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Bureau of Economic Analysis, and the Census Bureau, on technical methodology issues," and consisted of 15 unpaid volunteer experts from think tanks and academic institutions.
The committee held two in-person meetings each year, the last of which occurred Dec. 13, 2024, where they talked about how to improve survey response rates, wrote Pino. Falling rates on the BLS establishment survey, which asks employers how many people they employ and is used for the jobs report, has been a "major impediment to achieving greater accuracy," he said, as the response rate has plunged since the COVID-19 pandemic and no one knows how to reverse it.
"FESAC members at the December meeting heard from officials at statistical agencies in the U.K., Canada, and Germany who had all tried different things to improve response rates, with varying levels of success," wrote Pino. "In other words, this advisory group was doing exactly what one should want the government to do to improve its service to the public: Asking questions about what works based on experience and trying to formulate a better process."
Lutnick, he noted, ended the program in February, stating that "the purposes for which FESAC was established has been fulfilled" and provided no further reason.
"Was FESAC going to completely solve the long-running problem of lower response rates? No. But having it is better than not having it, and at little to no cost to the taxpayer, Lutnick did not need to disband it," Pino concluded. "Now, the Trump administration is mad about the exact thing FESAC was working on during its final meeting."