President Trump's firing of the Bureau of Labor Statistics chief following a lackluster jobs report has sparked debate over how the agency gets its data. Ben Casselman, the chief economics correspondent for the New York Times, breaks it down.

Washington

President Trump has raised concerns about the integrity of recent US jobs data, alleging the figures are 'rigged.' In response, a former commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) and Ben Castleman, chief economics correspondent for The New York Times, clarified how the BLS operates. They emphasized that the BLS commissioner does not control the reported numbers, which are finalized by career staff using established methods before being presented to leadership.

The BLS produces key economic indicators, including the unemployment rate and consumer price index, based on extensive surveys and payroll data. These estimates are periodically revised as more comprehensive information becomes available. Experts noted that while the data is not perfect and subject to revision, there is no evidence that the process can be manipulated or 'fudged,' and the system is designed to ensure accuracy and impartiality.

Fact-checking Trump's claim on jobs data being 'rigged'

Now, the United States has been a leader in reliable economic data for decades, but now the agency in charge of collecting that information is being scrutinized by President Trump. A former commissioner for the Bureau of Labor Statistics joined the takeout last night to discuss the president's claim that recent jobs numbers were rigged. The commissioner really has no control at all over what the numbers are. By the time he or she sees the numbers, they're finalized. They've been produced using methods that were laid out well in advance and carried out by the professional staff of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and what the commissioner gets is the final product. Ben Castleman is the chief economics correspondent for The New York Times, and he joins us now to help us understand what the BLS is all about. Ben, good morning to you. I think for most of us, we will have only had an interaction with this agency if we were Googling our salary expectations and the industry we're in to compare it, but help us understand what this bureau really does. Yeah, I mean, look, this is an agency that probably flies below the radar most of the time for most people, not for people like me who pay attention to this all the time. They produce some of our most important economic data. They produce the unemployment rate. They produce the numbers on how many jobs are added each month. They produce the consumer price index, which is our measure of inflation. If you get Social Security, your Social Security payments are indexed to the CPI, which is produced by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and this is staffed by hundreds of career staffers who collect the data, process the data, put out the best estimates that they can of some of this core economic data that then is used by the Federal Reserve, by the White House and Congress, by investors, by businesses, as they make their decisions and need to understand the economy. And so, Ben, help us understand how all that data is collected, because we've heard a reference to surveys and payroll information. How much of it can really be fudged? Yeah, I mean, look, I really don't think there's any way it can be fudged. These are estimates, right? We're trying to understand a $30 trillion economy in as close to real time as possible. And so, eventually, the sort of full information comes in from tax returns, from other evidence, but that takes a long time. And so, in the interim, what they have to do is do surveys. These aren't like the political polls we do. These are much, much larger surveys to try to generate estimates of how many jobs are added or lost each month. And they're very good, but they're not perfect. And they revise that data as it comes in. And sometimes those revisions can be big, as they were on Friday, which really kind of changed the narrative a little bit. But it's important to understand, these are produced by career staffers who serve across many administrations. And as Catherine Abraham, the former BLS commissioner, was saying in that clip a moment ago, the commissioner of the BLS is not the person making any of these decisions. The numbers get presented to that person as already finalized numbers. And we report on revisions all the time. How late can those revisions be posted? So, we always get revisions for the last two months when we get the new numbers. They then do a larger update once a year where they go back and they look at the actual filings that your employer and my employer send to their states. We get sort of hard numbers a year later, and they adjust to that. Those revisions can again be large, especially at times when there's a lot of economic change and it can make it hard to measure in real time. But again, these are the best estimates that they can come up with in the time that they have to do them. All right, Ben Castleman, insightful information there. Thanks very much.

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Breakdown