SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
You will often hear us report, on this program, about the unemployment rate, consumer prices, whether the U.S. economy is growing or shrinking. We put a lot of faith in those statistics, and they typically come from the federal government. Will they remain reliable, given budget and staffing cuts or what observers fear would be deliberate meddling? NPR's Scott Horsley digs into the numbers.
SCOTT HORSLEY, BYLINE: Erica Groshen used to run the bureau and the government that conducts the monthly jobs tally and calculates the inflation rate. After leaving the government, she served on an advisory committee that consulted on those and other key statistics - until this week, when she got an email from the Commerce Department saying, thanks, but her services were no longer needed.
ERICA GROSHEN: Well, I was surprised but not surprised.
HORSLEY: The terse email and a note on the department's website say the advisory committee was disbanded because its purpose had been fulfilled. That puzzled Groshen since she sees quality control as an ongoing process.
GROSHEN: Is part of the mission of statistical agencies to be continually improving.
HORSLEY: The message came just days after Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick suggested, in a Fox News interview, that he might change the way the government calculates GDP. Lutnick argued the change would present a more accurate picture of the economy, though it could also serve to mask negative effects of the Trump administration's spending cuts.
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HOWARD LUTNICK: Governments, historically, have messed with GDP. They count government spending as part of GDP. So I'm going to separate those two and make it transparent.
HORSLEY: Subtracting government spending from the formula would be a major break with longstanding practice and international standards. Erica Groshen says so far, she hasn't seen any evidence of interference with the official government data, but she is on the lookout.
GROSHEN: Statistical agencies live and die by trust. If the numbers aren't trustworthy, people won't use them to make important decisions, and then you might as well not publish them.
HORSLEY: President Trump himself has frequently challenged the government's economic data, suggesting, for example, that job gains in the Obama administration were exaggerated. Trump is happy to take credit, though, when the numbers are in his favor - like the time his first press secretary, Sean Spicer, touted a rosy employment report.
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SEAN SPICER: Yeah. I talked to the president, and he said to quote him very clearly. They may have been phony in the past, but it's very real now.
HORSLEY: Even without any meddling, government number crunchers have their hands full. Fewer people are answering their surveys these days, and their budgets have steadily eroded.
George Washington University professor Tara Sinclair is part of a group of business economists that works with the government data agencies.
TARA SINCLAIR: They've been really working on a shoestring budget. Now they're facing additional concerns and uncertainty about what their budgets are going to be going forward. And they've already seen staffing losses, in part, because of people taking what they call, you know, the fork emails.
HORSLEY: Government data can move financial markets and the president's polling numbers. Erica Groshen says that could create a temptation for someone to try to cook the books.
GROSHEN: Either for political purposes or possibly even for financial gain.
HORSLEY: Still, Groshen is confident that staffers at the government agencies would sound the alarm and probably resign if political people tried to doctor the data. She hopes that business people who count on the numbers to be reliable would also put up a fight.
GROSHEN: I would hope the business and the financial communities would speak up loud and clear. And, perhaps, maybe they'll speak up now just to prevent it.
HORSLEY: Taking the measure of this economy is not easy or free, but experts say losing the government's trustworthy data would be very costly.
Scott Horsley, NPR News, Washington.
(SOUNDBITE OF RICHARD HOUGHTEN'S "SOLO GIBSON") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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