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Trumps own former BLS chief himself doesn’t like it. And it includes this very damning quote:
Other articles note that usually, initial estimates are based on larger employers, and smaller ones take longer to report. Savvy consumers of the stats know this. Also, what size company has been hit hardest by recent market uncertainties including tariffs? Small employers. The variance is higher.
If a number feels off is your evidence, and it’s plausible or even likely that the explanation could be explained by either malice OR the underlying stats actually being off, it’s still “no evidence” in a statistical sense. We need DETAILS to be able to assess the claim, and Trump provided none, and furthermore if his own former guy says that the chief doesn’t even see the numbers until they are nearly fully assembled, we have strong reason to be skeptical and zero actual reason to trust him (beyond a baseline level of trust in Trump himself).
What does the commissioner... do, then? This feels like the scene from Office Space with the Bobs.
The commissioner is a people person. He takes the figures from the statisticians to the politicians.
Does he physically hand them over?
No, he faxes it. Sometimes the secretary sends the fax.
Staff organization stuff, I presume. Charitably, she (it was a woman) was in charge of approving methodological changes but presuming no such change happened, there's no reason to cast blame. That's what's so frustrating, there wasn't any specific allegation like, at all, that they released.
Well, no, that's not quite right: we can look at Trump's statement
That's the entire allegation. Note that the claim is much stronger than a mere claim that methodologies were changed or that the standards were relaxed or whatever. Nope, "concocted" and "rigged" mean something pretty clear. M-W definition for "concoct" is "devise, fabricate"; Cambridge has "to invent an excuse, explanation, or story in order to deceive someone". In other words, intentional manipulation. This would mean something along the lines of entirely inventing a number, or deliberately skewing your sample, or spontaneously cherry-picking a methodology, or something like that.
If this were true (obviously is not) than you wouldn't be firing the commissioner, you'd be firing normal-level staff too, or doing an actual investigation, right? You might fire the commissioner only if their people-leading skills were poor or their methodological direction was faulty, but that's not the case and not what's alleged.
It's nakedly anti-truth, and that's not a TDS thing to say. No need to defend Trump in every instance, this is just straight up wrong per the info we have access to, as it seems to be a top-down doubt on the numbers rather than a bottom-up, facts based one.
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The commissioner is the boss, in charge of all the people who do things. Or more likely in charge of several layers of sub-bosses before you get to the people who do things.
Which is why the quote isn't damning; with that authority comes the responsibility as well.
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In a statistical sense, saying "datum D is no evidence for theory T" is "P(T|D) = P(D)". Here we have "P(T|D) > P(D)", which is "D is evidence".
It's not much evidence. It's not nearly enough evidence. It's outweighed by other evidence to the contrary. It's grossly outweighed by reasonable priors. But it's still evidence.
I hate to pick on anti-Trump folks about this, when Trump's own relationship with truth seems to intersect propositional logic only by random luck; forget about Bayesian statistics. But it's still a red flag to me.
Decades ago I waded into investigation of a controversial belief system, a "religion" or a "cult" depending on who you asked. I debated with folks about evidence for and evidence against many of the beliefs, and my eventual conclusion was basically "false religion" ... but the most memorable part of those discussions was, when one guy I'd been debating with was asked by another interlocutor whether there was any evidence against his religion, his answer was a flat "no". Not "yes, but there's more evidence for it", not "yes, but only if you consider evidence out of context", just "no, there's no evidence against it".
I still had lingering questions (of what I'd later start thinking of as "epistemic rationality") to resolve, but now more pragmatic ("instrumentally rational") concerns were screaming at me to be wary in a way that continuing abstract discussion of science or history couldn't have done. It might not have been his religious leaders' fault, but that guy was in a cult.
Such self-inflicted damage isn't worth it for any ideology. You might still end up at a correct belief, or a dozen, but only by random luck.
Sorry and thank you, you're very right and right to call me out, I in fact do know better. I should have written "'no evidence' in the traditional sense* and expressed myself poorly.
Two things are true: in a Bayesian statistics sense most things count as evidence, and in an everyday sense people want to see some kind of fact to support an allegation. Zero were provided, as far as I see. Not even a cogent rationale was gestured at. I do try and consistently be charitable in my comments, I tried a bit in a follow-up comment above, but Trump's method of handling this gives virtually nothing to work with. (And as I stated, the former Trump-appointed commissioner sticking up for her is pretty large evidence against Trump's claim, even if you weight Trump's claims highly on a personal prior level)
Yeah, I can't disagree with any of that. In the colloquial sense "no evidence" fits.
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So? That doesn't mean it's "without evidence".
And that quote isn't damning at all. The fact that the commissioner doesn't collect the numbers herself does not mean she is not responsible for doing so.
I'm 99% sure Trump's wrong and she wasn't cooking the numbers, and it's likely she wasn't doing a bad job.
BLS commissioner 2013-2017, an Obama-era one but still obviously a person in the know:
I think that elucidates the point a little bit more, especially the bit about how methodology changes are obvious and up-front. The operation in professional statistics orgs like this is pretty plug-and-play on the collection side and there's a lot of cross-checking that happens. Plus, anecdotally, the BLS has one of the better reputations in the stats community and worldwide.
What I mean by evidence is like, if not actual whisteblowers or a smoking gun email or edited Excel file, at least some kind of specific alleged mechanism: did she pressure data collectors to poll only certain forms? Was the sample size abnormally low? Did they go on some kind of fishing expedition? Were internal policies not followed? Something like that.
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