This is Planet Money from NPR.

Amy O'Hara is a data person.

Trained as an economist, worked at the U.S. Census Bureau, now works at something called the

Massive Data Institute at Georgetown, and that's where she was last Friday, getting ready

to go out of town to Nashville for a big

statistics conference. It would have been a pretty chill Friday before travel. You know what I mean?

But it wasn't. It wasn't because in the middle of the day, Amy comes out of her office to meet

one of her colleagues. He's coming to pick up some stickers that they're planning to bring to that conference, stickers, all about how important good data is. But when

Amy comes out of the office, she realizes that her colleague does not look happy. He's like,

have you heard? Wow, did you hear about BLS? I said, no, what about BLS? BLS, the Bureau of Labor Statistics. As you may have

heard, they released their monthly jobs report last Friday, and it was a bad one. The economy is

adding fewer jobs than people expected. And the BLS also released their revisions to the previous

two months of jobs data. And those two months

were worse than we had thought. Revisions always happen, and these revisions were big,

but within a normal range. Basically, the report said that the labor market is not doing so great.

President Donald Trump, upon getting this bad news, fired the head of the Bureau of Labor

Statistics, a career statistician named Erica McIntyrefer. Amy and her colleague both know Erica,

and they're both shocked. Just literally standing there in silence for, I don't know, 20 or 30 seconds,

letting it sink in, because something had dramatically shifted don't know, 20 or 30 seconds, letting it sink in because something had dramatically shifted.

You know, it was that the norms that statistical information could be produced without political

interference, those norms were shattered.

The BLS is responsible for all kinds of important government statistics, the

...