The Labor Dept. doesn’t tweak jobs numbers for political purposes, or to make a president look good or bad, because to report inaccurate results leads to tremendous distrust of the government, messes up markets, and plans of major corporations.
And yet under President Donald Trump the Health and Human Services Dept. altered CDC documents – once considered sacrosanct documents – for political purposes, CNN reported last year.
So when The Washington Post reported Tuesday that the federal government “sharply underestimated job gains for most of 2021, including four months this summer in which it missed more job growth than at any other time on record,” some expressed concern.
Curiously, as the Post also noted, the exact opposite happened last year, when Donald Trump was president.
“Revisions in the already calamitous months of March and April 2020,” under Trump, “found the economy had lost 922,000 more jobs than initially reported.”
Oops.
Given what we know happened at CDC, you’d think some might be wondering what’s going on.
As it turns out, William Beach – the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the agency that since the start of the pandemic has been churning out wildly inaccurate (but very pro-Trump) numbers – was appointed by Donald Trump, used to work for a very pro-Trump think tank known as the Heritage Foundation, worked for a university research center that is funded by the very pro-Trump Charles Koch (as in the Koch Bros.), and also used to work for the Republicans on the the Senate Budget Committee.