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Marketplace All-in-One

Lessons from the rest of the world on politicizing economic data

Marketplace All-in-One

Marketplace

News, Business

4.8 • 1.3K Ratings

🗓️ 4 August 2025

⏱️ 19 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

President Trump’s firing of the Bureau of Labor Statistics commissioner is not without international precedent. Other countries have gone down the path of meddling with economic data for political gain. We’ll get into lessons we can take from the rest of the world. And, can the U.S. continue to be a bastion of scientific research in the wake of deep federal funding cuts? Plus, we’ll celebrate one listener’s feat of digitizing years of her great grandmother’s diaries.


Here’s everything we talked about today:


Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

Hello, everyone. I'm Kimberly Adams. Welcome back to Make Me Smart, where we make today make sense. And joining me on the show today is Marketplace's Samantha Fields. Welcome back, Sam. It's been a while.

0:18.5

Thank you, Kimberly. It's great to be back. And today is Monday,

0:21.7

August 4th. We're going to start with the news, as always, and then talk about some wins,

0:26.3

because I think we could probably all use that. Yeah, I feel like you should go first because

0:32.2

even though we talked about the story on Friday, it lasted through the weekend. It's the big economic story

0:39.0

in the United States right now. It definitely is. It lasted through the weekend. I think it's going to

0:43.5

last for a long time to come. And that is Trump's decision to fire the commissioner of the Bureau of

0:48.8

Labor Statistics because he wasn't happy that the latest jobs report showed the labor market

0:53.4

is not in a great place.

0:55.7

And yeah, I know you and Rima talked about this on Friday, but it does just feel like a really big deal.

1:01.0

Trump is now saying he's going to nominate a new BLS commissioner in the next few days.

1:05.5

And over the weekend, one of his chief economic advisors, Kevin Hassett, said that Trump wants his own people at the Bureau of Labor

1:12.5

Statistics. And the thing about all of this is it's just really going to undermine everyone's

1:17.7

confidence in that key economic data that we get from BLS. And just to remind people who might not

1:23.5

sort of be as in all of this data as you and I are all the time. That's the jobs report,

1:28.7

which is what triggered all of this on Friday. But it's also the inflation data that we get,

1:33.6

data on wages and spending. So these are all these really critical numbers that tell us a lot

1:39.5

about the economy. It's what the Fed uses to set interest rates. Businesses rely on it to make decisions on hiring and

1:46.2

investments. It affects the stock market and it affects all of us, really. And the thing is for a long

1:51.5

time, U.S. economic data has been sort of some of the best in the world. It has been very trusted.

1:57.5

And if we can't trust it going forward, that could have really profound negative effects on the whole economy.

2:04.6

Yeah, and I mean, there's definitely private sector data you can look at to get very similar bits of information like ADP, for example, issues jobs numbers themselves, but that's for private sector payrolls, not necessarily

...

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