Signs are increasingly pointing to an impending recession as U.S. President Donald Trump implements tariffs on key trading partners, oversees large-scale firings of civil servants, and pushes for cuts to public services. However, by dismissing economists, advisers, and experts who provide critical insights into economic shifts, the administration is effectively ensuring that neither the government nor the public can fully grasp the severity of these changes.
As reported by Politico on Friday, experts serving on the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ (BLS) Technical Advisory Committee were informed this week that their services were no longer needed. This leaves the BLS without a long-standing panel that has historically advised the Labor Department on how economic shifts impact data collection. Additionally, pages containing information about the Data Users Advisory Committee, which has guided businesses and policymakers on how to use the agency's reports, were removed from the Labor Department's website.
Michael Madowitz, an economist at the Roosevelt Institute, compared this move to a software company canceling its beta testing phase. "It would be a bad sign for a software company to cancel all beta testing if you expect to keep making better software," he told Politico. "This feels like the same sort of thing."
The removal of the advisers follows the dissolution of another crucial advisory board, the Federal Economic Statistics Advisory Committee (FESAC), by Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick. FESAC, which operated under the Bureau of Economic Analysis, has been instrumental in ensuring that government-produced economic data remains accurate. This committee's disbandment is seen as part of a larger effort to avoid undesirable economic indicators, even if it means altering definitions to downplay negative outcomes.
Former Federal Reserve economist Claudia Sahm, writing for Bloomberg on March 11, expressed concern over the growing lack of transparency in official statistics. She warned that cutting off agency staff from independent advisers could foster an environment ripe for political interference, which could go undetected. With political figures like Lutnick publicly suggesting that GDP should exclude government spending, the need for independent expertise has never been greater.
On Wednesday, the Federal Housing Finance Authority placed workers who helped compile its home price index on administrative leave, further disrupting the federal data infrastructure.
This dismantling of the government's data apparatus coincides with the illegal firing of two Democratic members of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) after one of them called on FTC Chair Andrew Ferguson to implement measures aimed at lowering consumer prices.
“This administration wants to write its own narrative,” said Stephanie Kelton, an economics and public policy professor at Stony Brook University. “If laying off tens or hundreds of thousands of federal workers is going to drag down macroeconomic indicators in ways that are unhelpful to them, they're apparently quite willing to just rewrite definitions to insulate themselves from the fallout.”
These moves come as the Federal Reserve projects a future of higher unemployment, faster inflation, and slower economic growth, or "stagflation." The Fed now expects growth to be only 1.7%, down from 2.1% in the final weeks of former President Joe Biden's administration, with unemployment rising to 4.4%. The New York Federal Reserve’s Manufacturing Index also indicates a downturn in the economy, with declining consumer confidence and the largest drop in sales at bars and restaurants since February 2023.
Members of Trump’s own administration are starting to admit that a recession may be on the horizon. Yet, as Lindsay Owens, executive director of the progressive think tank Groundwork Collaborative, put it, “the Trump administration is testing whether you can prevent a recession with a disappearing act.”
“Unfortunately, tossing a scarf over the GDP numbers doesn’t change the fact that their policies have us careening toward a downturn,” Owens added. “The fact that they are ramping up their obfuscation tactics confirms it.”
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