Experts are on a run of bad luck lately. Climate change predictions, Covid vaccine promises, jobs statistics, and economic analysis of the effect of the Trump administration’s tariffs have failed to improve experts’ credibility.
What’s the problem with the experts? Do they really know what they say they know? Do they know how much they don’t know? On their most recent podcast episode, Peter Schweizer and Eric Eggers of The Drill Down take the experts out to the woodshed.
Recently, Trump canned the commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Erika McEntarfer, claiming she had been incompetent and inaccurate with her monthly estimates of job growth in America. Critics of Trump’s move accused him of “shooting the messenger,” with former Labor secretary Elaine Chao defending the professionalism and security of the BLS’s survey.
“Imagine you’re in a job and you do the job so terribly that you are off by a massive factor,” Schweizer says. “Even before Trump was president, in March of 2024, BLS had to revise by 818,000 the number of jobs that were actually created. During the Biden administration, they overstated the number of jobs in the US economy by 1.18 million. That’s approximately 36 percent of all the new jobs” they thought had been created.
The problem with the BLS numbers being wrong is that they are one of the key metrics that the Federal Reserve looks at to make decisions about interest rates.
“Imagine you’re an accountant, and your numbers are off by 36 percent. Imagine you’re a plumber performing a plumbing job and your estimates are off by 36 percent of what needs to be done. Would that not be grounds for consideration to be fired?”
“This is something the expert class has created for themselves,” Schweizer says. “They overstate their ability to know things and, when challenged, appeal to their authority,” Schweizer says.
There are many other areas where the experts have been “fabulously wrong,” he notes, such as about climate change or the effectiveness of the COVID vaccine. “They told us, ‘If you take this vaccine, you’re not going to get covid or pass it.’ Which ended up being wrong,” he says. “The point is, they act with a certainty,” not that they’re just estimating or guessing based on statistical modeling. “They did the same thing on how many potential illegal immigrants have voted.”
A recent Stanford University-led study that just came out last week says that COVID-19 vaccinations saved about 17 million fewer lives than previously reported, the hosts add.
“You want to have experts, especially in certain areas where it’s critical, but this arrogant notion — that everybody else needs to shut up and focus on what they have to say and nobody else can have an opinion because they’re the experts — needs to go… When you totally flame out later on, people remember that. And what happens is people have a lot less trust in the medical establishment now than they did five years ago,” Schweizer says.
Regarding Trump’s tariffs, experts all said this would be like going back to the 1930s, but the economy remains strong. “The chief economic advisor for one of the world’s largest insurance companies told CNBC at the time that the risk to the global economy of a major recession would go up 50 percent.”
“And guess what? It worked. We didn’t get the massive recession. We didn’t have the economic calamity… The stock market is up massively from where it was when the initial shock occurred and all the experts were panicking everybody. And it’s another example where people are less inclined to believe what economists or experts are saying because they’re just so blatantly wrong,” he says.
Climate change, he adds, is yet another area where doom-and-gloom prophecies from the “experts” have not panned out. “Do you realize how much money the Biden administration spent on climate change? A trillion dollars,” he notes. “In 1998, the UN had a climate change study… And there were questions about whether the state of Florida would have beaches anymore because of such a high level of sea rise. Well, we can report now that, 27 years after that study, there are plenty of beaches.”
The Trump administration remains skeptical of such old predictions. Last week, Environmental Protection Agency administrator Lee Zeldin rescinded the Obama-era “endangerment finding” that has been justifying EPA’s regulations of carbon dioxide as a health hazard. Zeldin explained that the finding was based on bad data from “experts,” based on the most pessimistic views of a panel of scientists, which never materialized. “The good news is that now we can rely on 2025 facts instead of 2009 bad assumptions,” he told CNN.
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