Hi readers, it's the first Friday of the month. That means it's jobs report day — but it's not a typical one. I wrote about why, and shared a relevant conversation from Today, Explained. |
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| Seth Maxon, politics, policy, and ideas editor |
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| Seth Maxon, politics, policy, and ideas editor |
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On Friday morning, the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics will release its August jobs report, the first since last month’s brouhaha over its revised numbers. Early signs suggest that it may not paint a very pretty picture.
The July jobs report (released in early August) was explosive. It noted that in July, the US economy added 73,000 jobs, a bit under experts’ expectations. But the real headline was its revision of May and June’s numbers. The BLS said the country had in fact produced 238,000 fewer jobs in those two months than it had initially reported. Suddenly, and stunningly, President Donald Trump’s economy did not look as steady as it had appeared all summer.
Perhaps the most furious person about this new reality was Donald Trump. He responded with one of his typical Truth Social rages, and with an extremely atypical firing of the BLS commissioner, Erika McEntarfer. (Even though this data adjustment was significant and surprising, the jobs report numbers often get revised.)
But that wasn’t the end of the drama. Less than two weeks later, Trump tapped loyalist E.J. Antoni to succeed McEntarfer. Antoni is the chief economist at the right-wing Heritage Foundation and one of the architects of Project 2025. As Vox’s Cameron Peters wrote at the time, Antoni’s potential appointment left “many economists seriously concerned,” as “he’s widely considered to be underqualified for the job.” Even more alarmingly, Antoni has stated that under his reign, BLS could just stop issuing jobs reports, calling the bureau’s numbers “fake,” “phony,” and “unreliable.”
This whole mess inspired a great deal of consternation that Trump could try to politicize the best metric available for knowing what’s actually happening in the American economy — and that the jobs report under one of his lackeys may become useless or worse, if these numbers cease to be trustworthy. (Though fudging the data may be quite difficult.)
Antoni did not oversee today’s report — he faces a confirmation battle in the Senate. The agency is now headed by acting commissioner William J. Wiatrowski, a longtime BLS official who is widely respected. But Friday’s report will still be telling.
What might happen next? Last month, Today, Explained host Sean Rameswaram spoke with Marketplace reporter Kimberly Adams about the danger of politicizing these numbers. An excerpt of their conversation is transcribed below. Listen to the complete conversation wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.
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| Sean Rameswaram Now that Donald Trump has fired the commissioner in charge of these job report numbers, the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, it’ll all be okay again by the next jobs report in September? We all win? |
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| Kimberly Adams
I imagine that may be what the president wants to believe, that the numbers will be a bit more appealing. Almost all of the economists I talk to say that there’s no reason whatsoever to believe that the Bureau of Labor Statistics is manipulating the numbers or that the numbers are rigged, as the president said.
There’s been a huge backlash to this firing from the community of people that follow this stuff very closely. And putting in someone who might be a little bit more amenable to the president’s narrative around economic data has the potential to undermine economic data in the United States and make it less trustworthy — both for businesses here in the US, as well as in the global economy.
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| Sean Rameswaram
And why does that matter? I mean, for people who don’t pay attention to these numbers, why does trustworthy data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics matter to this country and to the world? |
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| Kimberly Adams
Because lots of different businesses and countries and even individuals use this data to make decisions about how they’re going to manage their money, how they’re going to manage their businesses, and how they’re going to plan for the future.
So, for example, if you know that the unemployment rate is 4.2 percent, which is what the numbers came in at last week, you can say that’s a pretty low unemployment rate. And that means that most of the people out there who want jobs have jobs. And if we’re going to hire, we’re going to need to position ourselves well in the market to compete with the relatively few workers who are out there looking for a job. |
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| Sean Rameswaram
Even if they still do the work, other people and other entities might look at it and say, well, can it really be true? |
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| Kimberly Adams
Look at a country like China, which releases economic data about the performance of its economy all the time. And you’ll always hear folks say, take it with a grain of salt because the Chinese Communist Party likes to mess with the numbers. That means lots of folks have to jump through all of these additional hoops to try to figure out what’s actually going on in the Chinese economy.
China is one of the biggest economies in the world. What happens if we end up in the same boat? |
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⮕ Keep tabs
The problem with “no tax on tips”: Trump’s “no tax on tips” plan is popular, writes Vox’s Eric Levitz — but that doesn’t make it good policy for progressives.
Trump’s lawyers may regret this: The Trump administration is asking SCOTUS to clear the way for Trump’s tariff regime. There’s just one problem, my colleague Ian Millhiser writes: They inadvertently admitted that the tariffs are illegal.
“Sometimes boring is good”: How Wikipedia became a bastion of reasoned debate on the internet — and why it’s now under attack. [The Verge]
A beleaguered national treasure: The National Park Service lost almost a quarter of its staff thanks to Trump administration cuts. Now national parks are suffering. [The New York Times]
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| Trump and Modi's broken bromance |
India’s prime minister was so tight with President Donald Trump that they held hands during public appearances. But the two strongmen are on the outs, and Narendra Modi has found a new hand to hold. |
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In July’s Wimbledon final, American Amanda Anisimova got trounced 6-0, 6-0 by world No. 2 Iga Swiatek of Poland. At the US Open on Tuesday, the pair met again in the quarterfinals — and Anisimova achieved the remarkable. Read more about it here, from Slate. |
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Today’s edition was produced and edited by politics, policy, and ideas editor Seth Maxon and staff editor Cameron Peters. Thanks for reading! |
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