These brutal firings and closures mean Trump is flying blind — and heading for a crash
Flying blind is dangerous, but it’s what Trump and his lackeys are forcing America to do.
For starters, the current government shutdown means that critical economic statistics — such as job numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics that normally would have appeared last Friday — are delayed. No one knows when they’ll appear.
The BLS also produces data on inflation and wages — also delayed.
At a time when there’s reason to worry that the American economy is weakening — when Trump’s tariffs (import taxes) are pushing prices higher, his ICE dragnet is causing labor shortages, and he is asserting control over the Fed’s interest-rate decisions — turning the lights off on the economy is a particularly bad idea.
But even if the government weren’t shuttered, Trump is still turning out the lights.
His firing of Bureau of Labor Statistics Commissioner Erika McEntarfer, on the basis of a jobs report showing a dramatic slowdown in the number of new jobs created under Trump’s watch, has caused many to wonder whether Americans will ever know the truth about how the economy is doing.
Once Trump completes his takeover of the Fed, there will be no inflation cop on the beat, with the result that no one can have any confidence that inflation will be controlled in the future.
Trump intends to replace quarterly earnings reports by publicly traded companies with twice-annual updates. This would put investors in the dark.
Trump and the sycophants surrounding him don’t mind turning the lights off on the economy because they’d rather Americans not know how badly it’s doing under Trump.
Besides, Trump doesn’t like data. He eschews facts. He wants investors and consumers — and everyone else — to be in the dark, because then he can lie without fear of factual contradiction. He can create even more of a fantasy world. He can pretend that he’s been wildly successful even when he’s been a terrible failure.
Trump’s concealment extends beyond the economy. He’s been misrepresenting evidence on vaccines. He’s slowing or stopping data collection on climate change and on bird flu.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) recently announced it was defunding its annual survey on food security. This is the nation’s longest-running and most consistent measurement of whether American families are meeting their basic nutritional needs.
Without this information, policymakers and researchers can’t track how many Americans are hungry and how many children are failing to receive adequate nutrition.
Trump doesn’t mind, because he and his Republican enablers in Congress just enacted the largest cuts to food assistance ever to hit American families. Meanwhile, his tariffs — combined with lack of antitrust enforcement — are making food prices soar.
In April, the Trump administration laid off all the analysts at the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) responsible for updating the federal poverty guidelines used to calculate eligibility for more than 40 programs, such as the National School Lunch Program and Low-Income Home Energy Assistance and parts of Medicaid and Medicare.
I doubt Trump wants Americans to know that poverty is rising on his watch, as it surely is. Nor is he especially concerned about updating eligibility for programs that keep Americans out of poverty — programs he’s actively and illegally cutting.
In March, DHHS suspended data collection for the Pregnancy Risk Assessment Monitoring System, a database on maternal mortality. In April, the full PRAMS team was put on administrative leave.
Trump doesn’t want Americans to know that women are very likely getting sicker and dying at higher rates due to his (and Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s) absurd policies limiting access to drugs and vaccines, his bonkers announcement that pregnant women shouldn’t take Tylenol (even if they’re running a fever), and policies denying women abortions — such as ending Medicaid payments to reproductive health care clinics that offer abortions.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced in May that it will no longer be updating its Billion Dollar Weather and Climate Disasters data, which tracks major weather and climate disasters that have total damages or costs of $1 billion or more.
I’m sure Trump is fine with this because he believes climate change is a “hoax.” He’s stopped funding wind and solar energy and instead given carte blanche to the oil companies. Of course he doesn’t want to track large climate disasters.
The lights are going out across America.
The problems that we as a nation have sought to illuminate, so that we can remedy them, are disappearing — not because the problems are disappearing or have been remedied, but because we will no longer know about them.
It is impossible to protect American consumers, workers, investors, families, and children without adequate data. Trump and his lackeys have little or no interest in protecting them — and even less in allowing Americans to know how little they care.
When this Trump daymare is over, one of our first priorities must be to restore all the ways of knowing what’s happening to Americans — and dedicate ourselves and the nation to sharing the truth.
- Robert Reich is an emeritus professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/
- Robert Reich's new memoir, Coming Up Short, can be found wherever you buy books. You can also support local bookstores nationally by ordering the book at bookshop.org.