LEILA FADEL, HOST:
When dismal job numbers were released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics last week, numbers that didn't back up President Trump's claim that the economy is doing great, he reacted immediately by firing the Bureau of Labor Statistics Commissioner, Erika McEntarfer. He explained it by saying this.
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PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: I believe the numbers were phony, just like they were before the election. And there were other times. So you know what I did? I fired her.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: Right.
TRUMP: And you know what? I did the right thing.
FADEL: And like many claims from the president about phony or manipulated data, he gave zero evidence for why he believes that. So we reached out to someone who's worked a lot with those job numbers to understand how hard it would be to just rig them. Erica Groshen is a former BLS commissioner, serving from 2013 to 2017, and she joins me now. Hello.
ERICA GROSHEN: Hello, Leila.
FADEL: What was your first reaction when the president just fired the commissioner after the jobs report came out?
GROSHEN: Well, I had actually speculated lightly that such a thing could happen. But, frankly, it's without any modern precedence. I mean, even as I said it, it was hard for me to believe it would happen.
FADEL: As a former commissioner, is it possible to just make the numbers up?
GROSHEN: No. The commissioner does not see any numbers before they're final. So they are already baked in the cake. The commissioner sees them before they're released and mostly approves the narrative that accompanies the table with the numbers. But the commissioner has no role in estimating the numbers in those tables. The commissioner doesn't have access to any of the systems and the data that go into the numbers. So a lot of people would know if the commissioner were fussing with the data, and the culture of the BLS is such that you'd immediately get pushback, resignations, whistleblowers, something like that.
FADEL: So it sounds like it would be nearly impossible without, as you pointed out, many people knowing to just phony up the data.
GROSHEN: Absolutely. That's intentional. That's not an accident. And when the BLS changes its methodology in any way, it publishes papers about it, it explains why it did it. All of that is very transparent.
FADEL: Let's talk about the public trust in the numbers. The U.S. government does put out a lot of data from climate to immigration to jobs, and we've seen a lot of moments where the government and the president have questioned what are supposed to be bipartisan numbers. I mean, what are the bigger implications when public data are questioned or impugned by the administration itself?
GROSHEN: Well, this information is infrastructure for our economy as much as roads and bridges are. It facilitates the decisions that we all have to make. And in our country, we believe in pushing decision making down to the lowest possible level - to the firms, to the families, to the local decision makers. And they need to have trustworthy data. And when we take that away from them, they're going to make what's technically known as lousy decisions. And they are going to be worse off, and the whole country is going to be worse off.
FADEL: That's Erica Groshen, former commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Thank you for your time.
GROSHEN: Thank you for having me on. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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