Trump Administration Gearing Up For Federal Data Takeover

As Donald Trump began his second mandate, independent researchers and citizens adapted to the war against data. They rushed to preserve diversity, public health and government reports and web pages related to climate change. They followed the impacts of funding reductions from the Government Ministry (DOGE) and federal job loss in real time. They have published calls on the importance of independent statisticians publishing some of the most compatible data in the world. Almost eight months after the inauguration, the abstract image of how Trump’s White House laid the foundations for revising the collection of federal data becomes clear.

Commerce secretary Howard Lungick told a group of federal statisticians that the independence of their work was “absurd” during a town hall for the census office and employees of the office of Economic analysis on Tuesday.

The comments were first reported by the government of the government, which obtained a registration of the Larick address to the group.

“As possible with as many tools as possible, get the right answer,” said Lunick. “Independence is therefore a nonsense. Okay, precision is the only word that matters.”

The language of Lunick could become the framework of a new precedent for the collection of federal data: a definition of “precision” which depends entirely on what makes Trump look good.

The change follows the Trump administration model now familiar with radical changes to the operations of executive branch agencies in response to the various grievances of Trump. This week, the White House officials told Wall Street Journal that the administration was reflecting on means to change the collection of job data after the president complained that negative federal economic data are designed to injure him personally and politically. He doubled this belief when he dismissed the Labor Statistics Commissioner, Erika Mcentarfer, just a few hours after a job report in July reduced the number of jobs added to the economy in May and June. When the number of job reports has shown positive economic growth, Trump did not call into question the validity of these figures and in fact taken the credit of job creation and other times reported.

After Mcentarfer’s dismissal Stephen Miran, Trump’s best economic adviser, told Axios that BLS needed to “reduce these review numbers” and that data needed “fresh eyes”. He then launched the idea of delaying the two -week monthly report to give companies included in the government’s investigation for more time to participate.

Several economists and politics experts have declared TPM in the past two weeks that important revisions are not unprecedented and often come when – and report that – there is a major change in the economy. The bad jobs responded to the uncertainty caused by Trump’s pricing policies. Small and medium -sized enterprises are particularly vulnerable to economic slowdowns and can submit their responses to the late survey, which leads to greater revisions.

The replacement of Trump for Mcentarfer is EJ Antoni, a hyper-partisan economist of the heritage foundation which helped the author at Project 2025. He has always penetrated points raised by Trump, disparaged the BLS and criticized his employment report, which, the experts, told TPM is an international stallion in terms of economic data. In another striking development, NBC revealed on Wednesday that Antoni was in the crowd at the January 6 insurrection. (A White House spokesperson said NBC Antoni was “in town for meetings, and it is false and defamatory to suggest that EJ is committed to everything that is inappropriate or illegal.”)

Antoni also adopted Stephen Miran’s suggestion to delay the Lightyears report, when, in an interview of August 4 published on Tuesday, he suggested that he completely stopped the legally mandated monthly job report.

On Wednesday, the American secretary of the Treasury, Scott Bessent, resumed Antoni’s suggestion in an interview with Bloomberg Surveillance. Bessent said he would not support jobs “” at all.

“What someone says when he is a private is very different,” said Bessent about Antoni.

He could. As a private and privileged citizen for Trump’s Treasury Secretary, besing Trump’s propensity at generalized and heavy prices and was considered by Wall Street as a regular force to the more destructive gélins of Trump. He told Financial Times in October 2024 that Trump’s pricing threats were a negotiation tactic. “My general point of view is that at the end of the day, he is a free trader,” said Bessent at the time. Since then, he has not been able to stop Trump’s prices, which have been taken from more than 90 countries.

And in this unexplored economic landscape, the Trump administration is pressure for the United States to produce less economic data.

In June, the officials held and then expternal a government report which predicted an increase in the deficit in the country’s agricultural products, according to a June Politico report.

“Politically embarrassing data prompted administration officials to block the publication of the written analysis normally attached to the report because they did not like what he said about the deficit,” Politico reported.

The BLS also announced that it had reduced data collection for its consumer price index, which measures inflation, by 19%. Although the agency has not indicated a specific reason for discounts, the New York Times reported that the agency “made reductions when current resources can no longer support the collection effort”. BLS financing has decreased by around 18% since 2009 when it is adjusted for inflation, according to a 2024 report by the American Statistical Association. Despite the drop in resources, Trump proposes to reduce the agency’s budget by $ 56 million in 2026.

William Beach, the former Trump BLS commissioner, said that he did not think that a new commissioner would be able to manipulate data to make him more politically due to the transparent process of the agency.

“There are integrated guarantees that are so impenetrable that you cannot do it,” said Beach at TPM.

For the moment, the experts have said that BLS had professional civil servants and independent apolitical statisticians who will continue to do their job. But even it could change.

Trump has taken several measures to politicize the federal workforce by modifying the posts of civil servants in positions of political names. In July, Trump signed an executive decree creating a new classification of “policies or policy” of federal employees.

“The final match here,” said Rob Shriver, Director General of the Strong Initiative of the Public Service Democracy, at the Federal News Network, “is to get as many people as possible from the work that swore to the Constitution – and bring as many people as possible in the work that is faithful to the President.”