The Trump Administration Is Laying the Groundwork for a Full Takeover of Federal Data

Posted on by Layla A. Jones

The moment Donald Trump began his second term, researchers and independent citizens suited up for the war on data. They scrambled to preserve diversity, public health, and climate change-related government reports and webpages. They tracked the impacts of Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) funding cuts and federal job loss in real time. They put out calls about the importance of independent statisticians publishing some of the most relied-upon data in the world. Nearly eight months after inauguration, the abstract picture of how the Trump White House laid the groundwork to overhaul federal data collection is becoming clear.

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick told a group of federal statisticians that the independence of their work was “nonsense,” during a town hall for Census Bureau and Bureau of Economic Analysis employees on Tuesday.

The comments were first reported by Government Executive, which obtained a recording of Lutnick’s address to the group.

“As best as humanly possible with as many tools as possible, get the right answer,” Lutnick reportedly said. “So independence is nonsense. Okay, accuracy is the only word that matters.”

Lutnick’s language could become the framework for a new precedent for federal data collection: a definition of  “accuracy” that is wholly dependent on what makes Trump look good.

The shift follows the now-familiar Trump administration pattern of making sweeping changes to the operations of executive branch agencies in response to Trump’s various grievances. White House officials this week told the Wall Street Journal the administration is mulling ways to change jobs data collection after the president complained that negative federal economic data is designed to hurt him personally and politically. He doubled down on this belief when he fired Bureau of Labor Statistics commissioner Erika McEntarfer just hours after a July jobs report revision lowered the number of jobs added to the economy in May and June. When jobs report numbers have shown positive economic growth, Trump hasn’t questioned the validity of those figures and in fact has taken credit for job creation and other reported upturns.

After McEntarfer’s firing, Stephen Miran, Trump’s top economic advisor, told Axios the BLS needed to “get those revision numbers down” and that the data needed “fresh eyes.” He then floated the idea of delaying the monthly report by as much as two weeks to give the companies included in the government’s survey more time to participate. 

Several economists and policy experts have told TPM over the past two weeks that large revisions aren’t without precedent and often come when — and signal that — there is a major shift in the economy. The poor jobs numbers responded to uncertainty caused by Trump’s sweeping tariff policies. Small and mid-sized businesses are especially vulnerable to economic downturns and may submit their survey responses late, leading to larger revisions. 

Trump’s replacement for McEntarfer is E.J. Antoni, a hyper-partisan Heritage Foundation economist who helped author Project 2025. He has consistently parrotted points made by Trump, disparaged the BLS, and criticized its jobs report, which experts told TPM is an international gold standard in economic data. In another striking development, NBC revealed on Wednesday that Antoni was in the crowd at the Jan. 6 insurrection. (A White House spokesperson told NBC Antoni was “in town for meetings, and it is wrong and defamatory to suggest EJ engaged in anything inappropriate or illegal.”)

Antoni also took Stephen Miran’s suggestion to delay the report lightyears further, when, in an Aug. 4 interview which was published on Tuesday, he suggested halting the publication of the legally-mandated monthly jobs report altogether. 

On Wednesday U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent walked back Antoni’s suggestion in an interview with Bloomberg Surveillance. Bessent said he would not support ending the jobs report “at all.”

“What somebody says when they’re a private citizen is very different,” Bessent said of Antoni. 

He would know. As a private citizen and favored pick for Trump’s Treasury Secretary, Bessent downplayed Trump’s propensity for widespread, burdensome tariffs and was seen by Wall Street as a regulating force to Trump’s more economically destructive whims. He told the Financial Times in October 2024 that Trump’s tariff threats were a negotiation tactic. “My general view is that at the end of the day, he’s a free trader,” Bessent said at the time. Since then, he’s been unable to stop Trump’s tariffs, which have been levied against more than 90 countries.

And in this uncharted economic landscape, the Trump administration is pushing for the U.S. to produce less economic data.

In June, officials held and then redacted a government report that predicted an increase in the nation’s farm goods trade deficit, according to a June report from Politico.

“The politically inconvenient data prompted administration officials to block publication of the written analysis normally attached to the report because they disliked what it said about the deficit,” Politico reported. 

The BLS also announced it decreased data collection for its Consumer Price Index, which measures inflation, by 19%. While the agency did not point to  a specific reason for the cutbacks, the New York Times reported that the agency “makes reductions when current resources can no longer support the collection effort.” Funding for the BLS has declined by about 18% since 2009 when adjusted for inflation, according to a 2024 report by the American Statistical Association. Despite declining resources, Trump is proposing cutting the agency’s budget by $56 million in 2026. 

William Beach, Trump’s former BLS commissioner, said he doesn’t think a new commissioner would be able to manipulate data to make it more politically favorable because of the transparent process at the agency.

“There are safeguards built in that are just so impenetrable that you can’t do it,” Beach told TPM.

For now, experts have said the BLS is staffed with professional civil servants and independent, apolitical statisticians who will continue to do their jobs. But even that could change.

Trump has taken several steps to politicize the federal workforce by changing civil servant positions into political appointee positions. In July, Trump signed an executive order creating a new “policy-making or policy-advocating” classification of federal employees. 

“The end game here,” Rob Shriver, managing director of Democracy Forward’s Civil Service Strong initiative, told the Federal News Network, “is to get as many folks as possible out of the job who take an oath to the Constitution — and bring as many folks as possible into the job who are loyal to the President.”

What Lines Should We Draw? President or Conqueror

Posted on by Josh Marshall

I had an interesting exchange with a TPM reader this week about President Trump’s takeover of the DC Metro Police Department and his conjoined decision to deploy National Guard troops to the nation’s capital. This reader’s argument was that it was a mistake to make a big deal of the DC decision, casting it as a dramatic and consequential abuse of power, because in fact Trump was acting within the statute that gives DC home rule. He said that what happened in Los Angeles this summer was different precisely because Trump had no legal right to do any of it. The reality — and this is true — is that DC is different. It’s not a state and it is in fact the domain of the federal government. Congress runs it. Congress decided to delegate that authority half a century ago to a local self-government. But the president can do these things. It’s right there in the Home Rule law. His justifications may be specious. But his actions in this case are likely unreviewable.

It was an interesting point and we went back and forth over it a few times. The opposition should save its mobilization and outrage, the reader argued, for when Trump crosses a line as he did in LA. DC is different.

Continue reading “What Lines Should We Draw? President or Conqueror” →

Republican Sen Jumps to Add Weird Anecdote to Trump’s DC Hell Hole Propaganda

Posted on by Nicole LaFond

It’s been clear since President Trump and his Fox News DC U.S. Attorney first announced that he was placing the Metropolitan Police Department under emergency federal control that he was trying to pull off another LA-style federal occupation of a city run by politicians he doesn’t like.

Continue reading “Republican Sen Jumps to Add Weird Anecdote to Trump’s DC Hell Hole Propaganda” →

Another Senate Dem Refuses to Participate in Budgeting to Protest Trump’s Power Grab

Posted on by Emine Yücel

Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT), a member of the Senate Appropriations Committee, has not been backing the historically bipartisan appropriations process used to compile the federal government’s budget for the next fiscal year in protest of the Trump administrations’ power grab on Congress’ power of the purse.

Continue reading “Another Senate Dem Refuses to Participate in Budgeting to Protest Trump’s Power Grab” →

The Courts Can’t and Won’t Save Us, Part 805

Posted on by David Kurtz

A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version.

RIP USAID

Yesterday brought another example of the extreme difficulty of litigating the constitutional structure of government in court and its inadequacy in reining in Trump’s lawless rampage in a timely fashion.

You may have seen that the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, in a 2-1 decision by Republican appointees Karen Henderson and Gregory Katsas, effectively ratified the Trump administration’s freezing of foreign aid funding. It was a bit more nuanced than that.

The court ruled that foreign aid groups could not legally challenge the impoundment of the foreign aid funding. Under the law, the court concluded, only the Government Accountability Office, an arm of Congress, can challenge the president’s impoundment of funds. To date, the comptroller general, who heads the GAO, hasn’t take that step. To emphasize, the GAO hasn’t even commenced a lawsuit yet. (Joyce Vance has more on this mechanism.)

The upshot is that after months of litigation, during which United States Agency for International Development (USAID) has been dismantled, it’s back to square one to hold Trump to account for his lawlessness. Or to put it another way, the damage has already been done and cannot now or at some future date be rectified in any meaningful way. One caveat: It’s possible the full court of appeals could overturn the panel decision.

The dissent by Judge Florence Pan, a Democratic appointee, was scalding of the majority:

My colleagues in the majority excuse the government’s forfeiture of what they perceive to be a key argument, and then rule in the President’s favor on that ground, thus departing from procedural norms that are designed to safeguard the court’s impartiality and independence. Moreover, the court’s holding that the grantees have no constitutional cause of action is as startling as it is erroneous.

In her dissent, Pan was clear about the structural constitutional issues at stake and the enforcement role that the two-judge majority was abdicating:

At bottom, the court’s acquiescence in and facilitation of the Executive’s unlawful behavior derails the “carefully crafted system of checked and balanced power” that serves as the “greatest security against tyranny — the accumulation of excessive authority in a single Branch.” Because the court turns a blind eye to the “serious implications” of this case for the rule of law and the very structure of our government, I respectfully dissent.

The USAID debacle remains one of the most haunting aspects of the first months of the Trump II presidency. And the collective inability, unwillingness, and indifference of the courts to rein it in is a sobering sign of the limits of judicial power against this executive.

Law Firms Who Struck Deals With Trump Now Pay the Piper

NYT:

Two of the law firms that reached deals with President Trump this year to avoid punitive executive orders were connected in recent months with the Commerce Department about working on trade deals, according to three people briefed on the matter.

The firms, Kirkland & Ellis and Skadden Arps, were connected to the department by Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer, Boris Epshteyn, two of the people said.

Quote of the Day

“Only historians and trained museum professionals are qualified to conduct such a review, which is intended to ensure historical accuracy. To suggest otherwise is an affront to the professional integrity of curators, historians, educators and everyone involved in the creation of solid, evidence-based content.”–Sarah Weicksel, executive director of the American Historical Association, on President Trump’s politicization of the Smithsonian Institution.

Trump White House Wants to Tamper With Jobs Numbers

The Trump White House is involved in discussions about changing the way the government collects and reports jobs data, the WSJ reports. It is clearly another way that the White House is trying to tinker with the jobs report to placate the president and minimize political damage from bad jobs numbers.

Oh?

NBC News reported that E.J. Antoni, President Trump’s egregiously unqualified nominee to lead the Bureau of Labor Statistics, can be seen in multiple videos on the grounds of the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, before leaving the area. The White House says Antoni was merely a curious “bystander” who wandered over to the Capitol after seeing news reports and did not cross any barricades or demonstrate.

The Corruption: Trump Pentagon Edition

Reuters:

Donald Trump’s Navy and Air Force are poised to cancel two nearly complete software projects that took 12 years and well over $800 million combined to develop, work initially aimed at overhauling antiquated human resources systems.

The reason for the unusual move: officials at those departments, who have so far put the existing projects on hold, want other firms, including Salesforce and billionaire Peter Thiel’s Palantir, to have a chance to win similar projects, which could amount to a costly do-over, according to seven sources familiar with the matter.

More Medicaid Cuts in the Works?

Politico: “An influential group of House Republicans has invited a chief architect of the hard-right push for deep Medicaid spending cuts to brief congressional aides Thursday as GOP leaders quietly map out a possible second party-line reconciliation package.”

Notable

The good government group Common Cause is backing away from its longtime opposition to gerrymandering and partisan redistricting, saying it will not actively oppose mid-decade redistricting in blue states.

Good Read

How Ukraine is scrambling to make sure Donald Trump doesn’t sell it out in tomorrow’s summit meeting in Alaska with Russia’s Vladimir Putin.

80 Years

Solomon Peña, the failed New Mexico candidate who was convicted of shooting up the homes of four Democratic officeholders in 2022-23, was sentenced to 80 years in prison.

Do you like Morning Memo? Let us know!

Pete Hegseth’s Pastor Wants ‘Spiritual Warfare’ Waged On All

Posted on by Josh Kovensky

The man who led a congregation that gave birth to the religious movement Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth now follows has a few principles for you to understand. A former Navy man, they’re informed by his career in the armed forces. But the kind of warfare he envisions isn’t always physical: it’s spiritual.

Continue reading “Pete Hegseth’s Pastor Wants ‘Spiritual Warfare’ Waged On All” →

Texas Republicans’ Bid to Out-Hard Ass Each Other Continues

Posted on by Nicole LaFond

As Texas Democrats mull when and how exactly they will return to the state, potentially later this week — despite the fact that Gov. Greg Abbott has vowed to keep calling for special sessions until his Trumped up congressional maps are approved — Texas Republicans’ efforts to outdo one another by attempting to arrest and punish Dems in creative ways are ongoing.

Continue reading “Texas Republicans’ Bid to Out-Hard Ass Each Other Continues” →

We Did It. You Did It.

Posted on by Josh Marshall

As you can see we hit our goal of raising $500,000 during this year’s drive. The drive will continue until later in the month. So if you didn’t get a chance to contribute, by all means the door remains very wide open. We can always put more dollars to good use. But $500,000 was the goal because that’s the number we need/needed to make good on our plans. So we’ll ramp back the reminders and pleas and so forth. We hit the finish line we needed to hit. We’re all set.

I’m writing this to thank you. One of our challenges running TPM is not treating things as routine even as they become in some sense factually routine. Our audience, you, just contributed half a million dollars in four weeks simply because we asked and said we would put it to good use. That’s amazing. And you’ve had our back, caught us in this organizational trust fall every time we’ve done this, which now goes back five years. It’s a testament to the trust you put in our team and the quality you see in their work. I’m thankful to them for doing that work. I’m thankful to you for recognizing it, for valuing it. This organization, this community has an extraordinary commerce in dedication and trust, passing those back and forth between the people who write the articles and those who read them. It’s a pleasure and an honor to be associated with all of it. Truly.

Was It Ghislaine All Along?

Posted on by Josh Marshall

I’m mildly fascinated by this piece in New York Magazine’s Intelligencer section. It’s the review of a new biography of Andrew, Duke of York, by a guy named Andrew Lownie. (The piece appears to be free for a limited time.) What sparked my interest is the major if not central role of Ghislaine Maxwell and thus Jeffrey Epstein. In fact, the upshot of the whole thing is to make Maxwell much more central and dominating figure in the Epstein story than perhaps even Epstein himself, certainly in Andrew’s life and perhaps in Epstein’s as well.

At one level I could not care less about any of these people. As I’ve noted in my other Epstein posts, I’m interested in the story because of the way other people are interested in it — lots of people — and how that interest both intersects with our politics and in some material ways explains our politics.

Continue reading “Was It Ghislaine All Along?” →