Terence Tao on the suspension of UCLA grants

It’s pretty clear that the only numbers this administration are interested in are ones that support the narrative that the great leader is infallible.

They just fired the commissioner of Labour Statistics. The great thing about autocrats is that they neuter their own country pretty quickly. When you make it risky for people to give you bad news, you end up with missiles that don't work and capital ships that sink.

The US BLS does seem to have a bit of a history [0] with their job reporting though. The process they've been using appears biased to over report initially and then get revised down over time. I'm sure there are a lot of political considerations, but from a raw statistical perspective there is a pretty easy path to getting better results. They could eliminate the optimistic bias and aim for accuracy.

If it were me I'd be sacking people until they started getting a mean adjustment somewhere around 0. I doubt that is what Trump is doing, but the managers left themselves vulnerable to technical criticism.

[0] https://mishtalk.com/economics/in-honor-of-labor-day-lets-re...

The source you cite is written by a man with literally zero training in economics or econometrics. He lost his job in 911 and started a blog in the GFC that gained an audience (https://mishtalk.com/economics/uk-high-school-student-asks-m...). Good for him. You assert with absolutely no basis in fact or any supporting citation that "there is a pretty easy path to getting better results." The BLS is run by the world's experts in how to measure what they are measuring. The private payroll company ADP reports their own numbers and has never demonstrated better accuracy despite the huge profit motive they have there. If it's so easy, then why don't you just write out a detailed explanation of how this supposed bias happens and how to fix it. You can't because it's not true that there is this sort of bias or that there is an easy fix (revisions are sometimes up and sometimes down, early data is not as reliable as later data). The BLS is constantly at work developing and testing new ways of doing their job better faster and cheaper. It's a difficult job done by thoughtful people. Bloomberg had a very contentious interview today with Peter Navarro and basically called him and Trump a liar over this made up allegation of political bias and/or incompetence at the BLS ("we just don't have evidence to support those instances here at Bloomberg"). This was the biggest miss in 50 years, yes. However, that's ignoring the fact that the economy is very much larger now and looking at the miss in terms of absolute job numbers revised is dumb, and the tariff uncertainty/TACO trade/Fed bullying/debt ceiling/and big beautiful bill drama is making this a particularly difficult time for this type of forecast.

> The BLS is run by the world's experts in how to measure what they are measuring.

And the commissioner was just sacked and the reason given was because she was incompetent. Goes to show the risks of being in a high performing environment and not having a trivially demonstrable track record of high performance. If a dude with no particular track record can clearly articulate why the numbers are biased then your employment might fall into question.

> And the commissioner was just sacked and the reason given was because she was incompetent

The reason given was she purposefully changed the numbers to make Trump look bad. There was of course no evidence given for that.

The reason given [0] is that "A lengthy history of inaccuracies and incompetence by Erika McEntarfer, the former Biden-appointed Commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, has completely eroded public trust in the government agency charged with disseminating key data used by policymakers and businesses to make consequential decisions. Under McEntarfer, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) consistently published overly optimistic jobs numbers — only for those numbers to be quietly revised later."

Which is certainly a political reason and easy to disagree with. But it is reasonable and factually defensible. Her Bureau has been publishing optimistic estimates.

[0] https://www.whitehouse.gov/articles/2025/08/bls-has-lengthy-...

No, that's the rationalizations some white house staffer wrote. The reasons Trump gave on Truth Social was that she purposefully changed the numbers to harm Trump.