Economists Are Seriously Alarmed About Official Data Under Trump

As the Trump administration guts and otherwise interferes with federal statistical agencies, nearly 90 percent of economists recently surveyed by Reuters are concerned about the reliability of official government data on the economy.

From July 11 to 24, Reuters polled economists—including “Nobel Laureates, former policymakers, academics from top U.S. universities, and economists from major banks, consultancies and think tanks”—and found that 89 of 100 of them “were concerned about the quality of official U.S. economic data,” with 41 saying they are “very concerned.”

Reuters’ report shows that alarm over Trump’s cuts to key agencies that collect and deliver data, such as statistics on jobs and inflation (to say nothing of other data impacted by Trump, such as that on health, weather, and education), has reached fever pitch.

Erica Groshen, former Bureau of Labor Statistics commissioner, told Reuters, “I can’t help but worry some deadlines [for future data releases] are going to be missed and undetected biases or other errors are going to start creeping into some of these reports just because of the reduction in staff.”

Groshen also noted “another very big risk”: that “all of the current administration’s changes will make civil service employees more like political appointees.”

MSNBC’s Steve Benen observed in an article earlier this month that the prospect of “corruption and political mischief” interfering with federal statistics under Trump is also worth keeping in mind. “Perhaps Donald Trump, the argument goes, might use his influence to tell the Labor Department to manipulate the data and deceive the public,” Benen wrote—though he noted “there’s been no evidence of statistics being altered to fit a political narrative” to date.

Even setting that worrisome possibility aside, Trump’s war against trustworthy federal data already threatens to wreak real havoc.

During a press conference last month, Fed chair (and MAGA persona non grata) Jerome Powell explained why we mustn’t take for granted “having good data” on the economy: This information, he pointed out, “doesn’t just help the Fed. It helps the government, it helps Congress, it helps the executive branch. More importantly, really, it helps businesses. They need to know what’s going on in the economy.”

For years, Powell noted, the United States has prided itself on being a leader in “measuring and understanding what’s happening in, in our very large and dynamic economy.”

“I hate to see us cutting back on that,” he continued, “because it is a real benefit to the general public that people in all kinds of jobs have the best possible understanding of what’s happening in the economy.”

President Trump is using $10 million of our taxes to market his new golf course in Scotland.

The president traveled to Scotland on Friday for the grand opening of an 18-hole golf course in Aberdeen. He’s expected to stay for four days. His appearance will likely generate positive revenue and publicity for the course—money that will flow right back into the pockets of the Trump Organization.

HuffPost has estimated that the trip will likely cost at least $9.7 million dollars due to Air Force One operations, motorcades and helicopters, Secret Service overtime, and more. Trump has framed the international vacation as a “working trip,” and has instead emphasized his plan to meet in Aberdeen with U.K. Prime Minister Kier Starmer. But Aberdeen is not the capital of the United Kingdom, or even the capital of Scotland, making it clear this meeting was just randomly added in to use as an excuse for the golf course.

Trump has grown more and more comfortable completely blurring the lines of his private businesses and his public office. This trip will make his second-term golf tab at least $52 million in just six months, according to HuffPost. His first term was $152 million over four years.

“We’ve reached a point where the Oval Office is an extension of the Trump Organization, and American taxpayers are footing the bill,” Jordan Libowitz of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington told HuffPost. “A president should not be spending time trying to make money in a foreign country while in office, but if they do, at the very least they could pick up the tab for their business trips.”

The cancellation of Stephen Colbert’s late-night show is apparently a sign of what’s to come for America’s media industry.

Speaking with CNBC Friday, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr blamed the comedy show’s demise on a lack of profitability, and warned that the “media industry across this country needs a course correction.”

“The American people simply do not trust the mainstream media,” Carr said, likening the current field of late-night comedy shows to genuine news outlets.

He has a point: Media trust has never been so low in this country. A February Gallup survey found that trust in news had fallen to a five-decade low, with just 31 percent of polled Americans claiming to trust the mainstream media a “great deal” or “a fair amount,” while 36 percent said they didn’t trust traditional news sources “at all.”

But threatening to forcibly curtail content via the heavy hand of the federal government—à la some Russian- or North Korean–inspired trajectory—is not the solution.

“For broadcasters, they have a federal license and they are obligated to operate in the public interest,” Carr said. “In the extent that we’re starting to see some changes, I think that’s a good thing.”

Some of the most prominent news companies in the country have already been pressured into changing their coverage of Trump. The longtime head of 60 Minutes, Bill Owens, quit after Paramount executives attempted to interfere with the show’s content, reportedly pressuring him to change how the show reports on the president. The former president of CBS, Wendy McMahon, resigned under similar circumstances shortly afterward.

Colbert’s show—the most popular show in its time slot—was canceled three days after the comedian claimed that Paramount’s $16 million settlement with Trump over his groundless lawsuit targeting Kamala Harris’s 60 Minutes interview looked like a “big, fat bribe.”

In his first show back following the announcement, Colbert didn’t deny that it was possible the show was hemorrhaging money. However, he said he couldn’t work out the $40 million loss that an unidentified Paramount source leaked to The New York Post—until he considered another possibility.

“$40 million is a big number. I could see us losing $24 million. But where would Paramount have possibly spent the other $16 million? Oh yeah,” Colbert said.

The FCC approved Paramount’s $8 billion merger with Skydance Thursday.

Asked on three occasions Friday morning whether he would consider pardoning convicted Epstein accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell, Trump first said he didn’t “want to talk about” it and, later, made a point to note he is “allowed” to do so.

“Well, I don’t want to talk about that,” the president responded to the first query about a potential pardon.

Later, Trump said: “It’s something I haven’t thought about. It’s really some—it’s some. I’m allowed to do it, but it’s something I have not thought about.”

“But you wouldn’t rule it out?” a reporter followed up, but Trump did not reply.

Later still, the president told reporters, “I certainly can’t talk about pardons right now.”

While the president’s response wasn’t a “Yes,” it certainly wasn’t a “No,” either. (And recall that, in 2019 and 2020, Trump said he hadn’t thought about pardoning Roger Stone, whom he pardoned in December 2020.)

Trump’s glaring nonanswers come as his allies appear increasingly open to embracing Maxwell as a way out of his Epstein mire. The administration is facing an uproar over its lack of transparency and Trump’s personal ties to notorious pedophile Jeffrey Epstein.

Maxwell is currently serving a 20-year sentence for helping Epstein sexually abuse minors. (When she was arrested by the FBI in 2020, Trump had said, “I wish her well.”)

Despite Maxwell’s crimes, as Rolling Stone reported Thursday, “the Trump administration and the president’s allies in Congress seem to think that if they get Maxwell to attest that Trump did nothing wrong,” it will solve everything. MAGA media has also begun cozying up to the convicted sex criminal.

In recent days, the Republican-controlled House Oversight Committee subpoenaed Maxwell and will depose her next month. Meanwhile, Todd Blanche, Trump’s deputy attorney general and former personal lawyer, has met with Maxwell and will meet again Friday, purportedly to gain information “about anyone who has committed crimes against victims.”

The potential for corruption in Blanche’s closed-door sit-downs with Maxwell, who has everything to gain from aiding the president, is plain, as has been much observed by Democratic lawmakers and other critics. The observation was even made by Trump toady House Speaker Mike Johnson, who recently told reporters that he backed the House Oversight Committee’s move to subpoena Maxwell while noting an “obvious concern”:

Could she be counted on to tell the truth? Is she a credible witness? I mean, this is a person who’s been sentenced to many, many years in prison for terrible, unspeakable, conspiratorial acts, and acts against innocent young people. I mean, can we trust what she’s going to say?

Palm Beach County Attorney Dave Aronberg and former aide to Pam Bondi, now Trump’s attorney general, has speculated that the DOJ’s talks with Maxwell could presage a “hidden pardon” deal.

And of course it wouldn’t be unprecedented for Trump to flagrantly abuse the pardon power.

This story has been updated.

President Trump suggested on Friday that Israel should “finish the job” and “get rid of it,” when asked about Gaza, which is now suffering from mass starvation due to Israel’s blockade.

“Gaza, they pulled out of Gaza, they pulled out in terms of negotiating. It was too bad, Hamas didn’t really wanna make a deal. I think they wanna die. And it’s very, very bad,” the president said on Friday before departing for Scotland. “You’re gonna have to finish the job … don’t forget, we got a lotta hostages out. So now we’re down to the final hostages and they know what happens after you get the final hostages. And basically because of that they really didn’t wanna make a deal I saw that. So they pulled out, they’re gonna have to fight, they’re gonna have to clean it up. You’re gonna have to get rid of it.”

The Trump administration has been explicit about its horrifying vision for Gaza, as the president clearly views it as potential property for an Israeli beach resort rather than an area that human beings call home. The genocidal language he casually uses here, saying that Israel needed to “get rid of it,” only reinforces that.

While leaders like France’s Emmanuel Macron and the U.K.’s Kier Starmer have this week finally decided that the indiscriminate killing of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians—for throwing rocks, for waiting for aid, for doing journalism, for simply refusing to leave their homes—has become too much, Trump has tripled down in his dismissiveness. All signs point to him allowing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s butchering of Palestine to continue uninhibited.