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How Trump Plans to Manipulate US Economic Data to Gaslight the Public [1]

['Sam Gustin', 'Alfred Mccoy', 'Elie Mystal', 'Ben Schwartz', 'James K. Galbraith', 'Ella Fanger', 'Jeet Heer', 'Ed Morales', 'Isabella M. Weber', 'Joshua Frank']

Date: 2025-03-10 09:30:00+00:00

Economy / How Trump Plans to Manipulate US Economic Data to Gaslight the Public The president and his GOP cronies want to tamper with government statistics and use deceptive budget gimmicks to lie about the impact of their massive tax and budget cuts.

An economy already flashing warning signs: A Forever 21 store that is preparing to close on February 20, 2025, in San Francisco, California. The retailer is set to close 200 stores as the company considers a second bankruptcy filing. (Justin Sullivan / Getty Images)

The one-sentence “termination” e-mail arrived in Erica Groshen’s inbox at 8:32 am last Tuesday.

Groshen, a former commissioner of the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, had spent more than four years as a member of a little-known but highly respected federal advisory board that helped the US government produce accurate and reliable economic data. That was until Tuesday, when the Federal Economic Statistics Advisory Committee (FESAC) was summarily dismissed, another casualty of President Trump’s assault on the federal government—and the concept of public policy expertise itself.

“I was so disappointed,” Groshen told The Nation. “It’s so important to have these high-level advisory committees because statistical agencies have to be continuously improving, which means getting expert advice and information from outside of government. Eliminating an advisory committee like this suggests an intent to make the government less transparent.”

Transparency—or the lack thereof—may just be the least of it.

The Trump administration and Republican lawmakers are preparing to manipulate the federal budget and doctor US government data in order to mislead the American public about the true cost of their proposed $4 trillion tax cut, the draconian budget reductions needed to pay for it, and the ruinous impact these policies will have on the US economy, which is already veering dangerously in the direction of a recession.

David Wilcox, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics who served until last week as FESAC’s chairman, said in an interview that disbanding the advisory committee—an all-volunteer panel of experts from the private sector and academia—will deprive the public of an independent, nonpartisan brain trust whose goal was to help the government improve statistical accuracy in response to new technologies and ever-changing economic conditions.

Last week’s FESAC purge was particularly alarming because it came just days after Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, a Wall Street plutocrat and Trump campaign bundler, announced plans to alter an important measure of US economic growth—Gross Domestic Product, or GDP—by stripping out all government spending. GDP combines consumer purchases, business investments, net exports, and yes, government spending, to measure the total monetary value of goods and services produced in the United States.

There are many valid criticisms of GDP as a measure of economic health, including that it doesn’t account for unpaid work, the shadow market, income inequality, or climate change, among other shortcomings, but it is nevertheless closely watched by economists, governments, corporations, investors, and households worldwide.

By excluding government spending from the official GDP estimates issued by the Bureau of Economic Analysis, the Trump administration could downplay the economic damage of firing hundreds of thousands of federal workers and slashing billions from the federal budget. In other words, they could gaslight the public into believing that the economy is doing better than it actually is, which could come in handy if economic conditions continue to deteriorate.

“This administration wants to write its own narrative,” said Stephanie Kelton, a professor of economics and public policy at Stony Brook University. “If laying off tens or hundreds of thousands of federal workers is going to drag down macroeconomic indicators in ways that are unhelpful to them, they’re apparently quite willing to just rewrite definitions so they can insulate themselves to the extent possible from the fallout.”

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[1] Url: https://www.thenation.com/article/economy/trump-manipulate-economic-data-fesac/

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