On Monday’s broadcast of CNN’s “The Lead,” Rep. Don Bacon (R-NE) said that President Donald Trump “should have done due diligence, did a review before pulling the trigger here,” and firing BLS Commissioner Erika McEntarfer and “shooting the messenger as a boss is a bad thing.”
Bacon said, “I do think it was a mistake to so rapidly fire this director. I think it was probably very important to get the facts first and then make a decision. But shooting the messenger when you’re the boss has a lot of impact. … I think, in this case, the numbers reflect about 45% of the data for the first month and you’re going to have the second and third month to get more data, and you can get some revisions. That’s what happened with, also, their revisions for the second and third month this time around. Shooting the messenger is not a good thing if you’re a boss.”
He added, “Well, the revisions, at times, have been pretty drastic, like they were this time, where we saw a significant decrease in the employment numbers. But if you dig behind why that happened, and I was doing some reading today, in one of our papers, and it was, there was a lower-than-normal turnout for the initial tranche of information. And then you get the second and third tranche, and it created a significant change. And what I understand is the Bureau here is getting — they’re not getting the feedback in an expeditious manner like they used to. So, we’re starting to see more significant revisions there. But that doesn’t mean that these people aren’t trying hard. It doesn’t mean that they’re trying to skew the data. And so, I think the President should have done due diligence, did a review before pulling the trigger here, shooting the messenger as a boss is a bad thing. It has second and third-order effects, and we don’t want to make our — we don’t want our data to look suspect to the American people and people making decisions on economic matters.”
Bacon further stated, “I’m reading a book on Stalin right now. They were putting out data back then on, whether it’s America or the Soviet Union at the time, the European countries, everything’s based on data, and you’ve got to have accurate data. And the interesting thing I find is, Stalin didn’t want accurate data. It was, if you gave him accurate data, he would kill you. This isn’t something like that. But we’ve got to have accurate data. And we’ve got to trust what’s put out there.”
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