With Donald Trump taking over the government for a second time with grandiose promises to reshape the federal government, he will be in a strong position to install loyalists who may be willing to fiddle with data that experts rely on to assess the economy. Such a shake-up would cripple the state's ability to fulfill even its most basic obligations — and transform it into an instrument of political power, a former high-ranking civil servant warned in an interview with Salon.
Rising costs of living has been at the top of many Americans' minds, and one key source of information for them has been the national inflation rate produced by the Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics. The inflation rate, along with job creation numbers, census data and other statistics produced by federal civil servants, not only gives the public insight on the state of the economy in hard numbers, but also informs federal decision-making from routine duties to crisis situations.
