EPI releases new data accountability dashboard amid Trump attacks on federal statistical agencies

As the Trump administration attacks federal statistical agencies (FSAs), a new Economic Policy Institute dashboard compiles next-best data from non-FSA sources to shed some light on the economy and-even more importantly-to provide an accountability check against efforts to manipulate FSA data in the future.

Federal statistical agencies produce the gold standard economic data that employers, investors, job seekers, workers, and policymakers rely on to assess the health of the U.S. economy. However, FSAs face historically unprecedented threats from the Trump administration to their capacity and even their independence. This raises the specter of a future where FSA data cannot be relied upon to honestly report whether the U.S. economy is experiencing dysfunction. The first and best line of defense against data manipulation escaping public notice will be whistleblowers from FSAs who are dedicated professionals and will not want it degraded. But if data are being manipulated and whistleblowers emerge, the dashboard can provide useful data accountability checks to back up claims that data is being manipulated or suppressed to hide bad news.

The dashboard serves as a one-stop shop for non-FSA data sources-including ADP employment data, job cut announcements from the Challenger report, and consumer sentiment reports. The dashboard explains each measure being used, how it traditionally behaves during recessions, if it tends to mirror any data series collected by federal statistical agencies, and what to expect should the economy slow significantly or enter recession.

This set of next-best data sources is clearly inferior to the datasets that have historically been collected and analyzed by the nonpartisan, expert professionals who staff FSAs. For example, these next-best data offer no insights on how the economy is affecting U.S. households differently by race, gender, or ethnicity. Despite the obvious and fundamental weaknesses of these next-best data, they can provide a signal-even a very fuzzy one-if the economy begins deeply malfunctioning and official data sources are suppressed or manipulated to deny it.

"The data collected by the federal statistical agencies are an incredibly valuable public good. While there would never be a good time to squander it, the absolute worst time to degrade data quality is when the economy is facing policy shocks that threaten to cause either a recession or an uptick of inflation. Given this urgency, we're collecting all data we can to assess the economy's health in this time when the gold standard data are under attack," said Elise Gould, EPI senior economist.