Do Your Own Math, America

Last week, Donald Trump fired the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Erika McEntarfer, for “rigging” employment numbers he had previously trumpeted, supposedly using downgraded Biden-term jobs figures to make Trump look bad. It was a preemptive strike. If people trust numbers from a 141-year-old federal agency, they will believe the future jobs reports revealing that the Trump economy only creates jobs in the pimpled-tech and neo-fascist gang/Waffle House SS Trojan horse rental sectors.

While this instance of new policy occurred within the BLS, it represents the future of the administration’s approach to economic policy and analysis: Qualified agency employee firings will continue until the numbers improve.

Sure, it’s seedy Mafia-like intimidation, but it has a respectable right-wing ideological pedigree. When future Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell wrote his 1971 memorandum calling for combating creeping communism by building an infrastructure of think tanks to seed the discourse with the load-bearing alternative facts, his dream came up short. As the saying goes, reality has a liberal bias. Well, thank God there’s finally been a breakthrough. Trump has cut out the middleman and passed the prosperity on to you, because you no longer need to measure reality to see what the real numbers are. 

The cracks in Trump’s relationship to economic data are plain to see. Third party groups can do a decent job of reconstructing what government data likely is, but there is no substitute for the capacity of the U.S. government to quantify and analyze what it produces. Uncertainty about the economy’s actual health will stymie investment and innovation. Numbers that haven’t been manipulated will be tarnished by proximity to ones we know have been corrupted. If numbers are tabulated to remove doubt, changing even one for political purposes suffuses the rest of them with enough of it to defeat the purpose of the whole. The stakes are highest for Trump’s richest backers, who control the markets by making enormous bets, because you can’t make a smart bet with bad data. Trump is dealing a hand of poker, telling fund managers and CEOs that the joker and “According to Hoyle” cards are both aces, and it’s up to them how much money they want to put on the table.

Regrettably, just shy of 100% of the people writing and reading this are not billionaires. If fudging the numbers just made life worse for, say, Bill Ackman — then, well, dayenu; he can afford to drop 10 grand on a subscription to “The Barron’s Guide to Actual Numbers.” But this decision and these effects will produce ruinous downstream and downmarket consequences. The other effect of Trump manipulating data is that it forces normal people to play “Macroeconomic Forecast: The Home Game!” Instead of relying on professionals whose work serves the American people, we are effectively inducing the economic equivalent of, “Do your own research on the efficacy and dangers of mRNA vaccines at home by asking TradHotwife1488 about it on Reddit.” It doesn’t take a vast imagination to conceive of all the ways small business owners or people considering a career change might want to have a comprehensive and unbiased view of what unemployment or really any part of the economy out there is like.

In a way, making all of us dumber and pushing the risk inherent to that onto you fits neatly within Republican ideology, the statistics version of replacing a guaranteed pension with amateurish gambling with a 401(k). “You can just build your own jobs report” is just what happens when “you can be a rational economic actor in perfect negative liberty and test and treat your own water for pathogens at home” gets applied to the economy. But it’s probably more recognizable to you in the form of what happens when Democrats try to win votes by applying conservative ideology to their own programs: Obamacare.

One of Obamacare’s selling points was that the business of wading through various health plans would put the decision in the hands of the person most capable of making informed decisions about it: You. Forget the fact that you have neither the time nor the training nor the inclination to read bricks of health insurance policies. Think of the systemic efficiencies eliminated by your making optimal granular decisions in your own self-interest! 

In practice, you probably know what this process is really like: You feebly find a couple plans with bearable premiums that appear to cover the few things you need, press the button and pray. The next year, that plan is gone, but another seemingly identical one has taken its place. You press and pray again, and for no reason in particular, a co-pay on a suite of your prescriptions has appeared or disappeared, and you will never know why. Now imagine doing this with any data collected by the U.S. government on any subject.

What the galaxy brains behind Obamacare didn’t seem to realize is that nobody wants to do this work. In fact, the greatest appeal behind universal health care — beyond the parts about avoiding death, infirmity and suffering — is that you don’t have to do any of this exhausting bullshit. What people want is: Get sick, see doctor, get care, get on with your life. 

Effectively, all Trump is doing is devolving work to the exhausted and unqualified. It’s fine if Republicans want to epistemically crawl up their own assholes and stay there, but the rest of us have too much labor on our plates already to add the herculean toil of having to reconstruct the basic metrics of observable economic reality. We do not have time for this project, we did not ask to be assigned to it, and we do not want to have to ask which of our friends still gets Consumer Reports, so we can read 2026’s “Top 20 Subscription Economic Indicators Issue.” 

What this represents, then, is another installment of the frequent post-2016 lament: I don’t want to have to think about the president this much. And while that lamentation might initially scan as woefully selfish, it’s a despair that applies to the common weal. We, as a nation, created institutions like the Bureau of Labor Statistics because we recognized a value to doing so. Not only does the BLS make it easier for corporate titans and everyday shopkeepers to make smart plays in their marketplaces, it makes it easier for us to be people. We professionalized these tasks to unburden hundreds of millions of tired amateurs, to liberate us from another chore by placing it in the hands of apolitical specialists. At the end of the day, we made things like the BLS because they gave us the freedom to think about something, anything else.

Maybe it doesn’t have to be this way. Wednesday night, Attorney General Pam Bondi, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, FBI Director Kash Patel and others reportedly met with JD Vance at the vice president’s residence to strategize how to handle Donald Trump’s persistent Jeffrey Epstein problem. All-hands meetings featuring enough big names to headline each night of Fascist Coachella are the political equivalent of Kevin Bacon at the end of “Animal House” shouting, “Remain calm! All is well!” before presumably getting trucked by berserk wives at the Faber College Homecoming Riot.

One hopes Trump’s Epstein issues are dire enough that this clutch of jackals is ready to push grandpa out of the lifeboat. Letting the tide take Trump off toward a submarine summit with Osama bin Laden presents such a blockbuster move for these faithless, shameless scavengers that nobody would give them too much guff if they decided to throw “not measuring the economy” and “cutting off billions in grant money to many outstanding public universities in red states with Power 5 programs” out of the boat too.

It would seem to be a monumental move, but it asks much less than the alternative. Trump’s solution to drowning in bad employment numbers is to drown 330 million people with bullshit. That is not a proportional response. If he doesn’t like where this current is taking him, most of those 330 million would probably prefer to watch him learn to swim.