Reliably on the first Friday of every month for the past 50 years, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) has released data on how women of color are faring in the economy. It’s the only timely source of this demographic-level data, making the fight over economic data a significant one.

Without it, economists and policymakers would have no way of knowing how economic policy is affecting marginalized groups of workers in real time. They’d be flying blind on how to help them.

But that’s just what President Donald Trump’s nominee to run the bureau is suggesting doing.

On August 1, Trump fired the head of the bureau, Erika McEntarfer, after BLS published one of the largest revisions to its data in decades. The revision showed that the economy was in fact weaker than previously reported, leading Trump to accuse McEntarfer of tampering with the data to make his administration look bad.

Revisions of economic data have also always been part of how BLS, an independent and nonpartisan agency, functions. The data is collected from surveys of employers and households, and then published in three waves. The surveys are voluntary, so not all responses come in on time. BLS publishes an initial release and then revises in the subsequent two months as more responses come in. It’s done this way to ensure that markets and economists get real-time data on the economy. Since the pandemic, BLS has been struggling with lagging response rates and a rapidly changing economy that has led to larger revisions.

The reports are still considered one of the most reliable sources of U.S. economic data in the world, showing the gravity of the fight over economic data.

McEntarfer, who was appointed by former President Joe Biden and was confirmed in a nearly unanimous Senate vote, is a widely respected economist who had worked in the federal government under multiple administrations. Trump’s nominee to replace her, E.J. Antoni, is an economist at the conservative think tank the Heritage Foundation who contributed to Project 2025. Discussing the employment data earlier this month, Antoni suggested that until the data is “corrected,” “the BLS should suspend issuing the monthly job reports but keep publishing the more accurate, though less timely, quarterly data.”

Read the full article about the fight over economic data by Chabeli Carrazana at The 19th.