Rule change would allow Trump to 'cook the books' and hide collapsing economy: report

As part of Donald Trump's administration's purge of federal employees who are believed to not be willing to support his agenda, there is a new move afoot to make it permissible to fire federal financial analysts if their reports don't paint the pretty picture the president demands.

According to a report from the Guardian's Robert Tait, government "number-crunchers" may find themselves out on the street if they submit reports that make the current administration look bad.

That has led to worries that future reports coming out of the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) and the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) will have been manipulated before they are released to the Federal Reserve and the press.

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As Tait wrote, fears of staffers "intentionally subverting presidential directives” could set the stage for the White House to "fire statisticians employed to produce objective data on the economy but whose figures prove politically inconvenient, experts warn."

That, in turn, could lead to efforts by the administration to "cook the books" and deceive the markets and the public.

Explained government accounting expert Erica Groshen of Cornell University, "There are a number of changes to the civil service that make it much easier for the administration to try to interfere with the activities of the statistical agencies and that worries me."

In a briefing paper she authored, she warned, "Bureau of Labor Statistics’ leaders could be fired for releasing or planning to release jobs or inflation statistics unfavorable to the president’s policy agenda,” adding, "By making it easier to remove employees if a president determines that they are interfering with his or her policies, it increases the potential for passivity or political loyalty to be prioritized over expertise and experience.”

Erasmus Kersting of Villanova University added, "I would say that there’s definitely an incentive to cook the books, but I don’t think that it is going to be very easy or feasible to do.”

Grohan built on that point by telling the Guardian, "In a democracy, you want to be feeding people the right information so they will make the right choices. But if the goal is to destroy democracy, you’d want to control the statistics to fit your story … you want to be promoting your own version of reality.”

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