An April 2025 episode from Bloomberg's Odd Lots podcast, "Some of America's Most Important Economic Data Is Decaying": > Gathering official economic data is a

An April 2025 episode from Bloomberg's Odd Lots podcast, "Some of America's Most Important Economic Data Is Decaying": > Gathering official economic data is a huge process in the best of times. But a bunch of different things have now combined to make that process even harder. People aren't responding to surveys like they used to. Survey responses have also become a lot more divided along political lines. And at the same time, the Trump administration wants to cut back on government spending, and the worry is that fewer official resources will make tracking the US economy even harder for statistical departments that were already stretched. Bill Beach was commissioner of labor statistics and head of the US Bureau of Labor Statistics during Trump's first presidency and also during President Biden's. On this episode, we talk to him about the importance of official data and why the rails for economic data are deteriorating so quickly. * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nfgpqVixeIw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nfgpqVixeIw * https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/some-of-americas-most-important-economic-data-is-decaying/id1056200096?i=1000705520320 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/some-of-americas-most-... * https://archive.is/https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-04-30/why-us-labor-statistics-and-other-data-are-deteriorating-jobs-report https://archive.is/https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2... William ("Bill") Beach was the head of the BLS of the before the just-fired head; he was Trump-appointed and Heritage Foundation fellow, and not a fan of the firing: > The totally groundless firing of Dr. Erika McEntarfer, my successor as Commissioner of Labor Statistics at BLS, sets a dangerous precedent and undermines the statistical mission of the Bureau. For a full statement opposing this move, read: https://www.friendsofbls.org/updates/2025/8/1/statement-on-commissioner-mcentarfers-removal https://www.friendsofbls.org/updates/2025/8/1/statement-on-c... * https://twitter.com/BeachWW453/status/1951376029060055506#m https://twitter.com/BeachWW453/status/1951376029060055506#m Also, from 2023, "Houston, We Have a Data Problem": > The concerns are laid bare in a recently published report from the National Academy of Sciences. It includes a table showing that response rates to household surveys for basic information such as the current population survey (CPS) undertaken by the Census Bureau and the housing portion of CPI (a crucial input for overall inflation) have drifted down dramatically in recent years. The housing survey, for instance, used to get responses from about two-thirds of those surveyed. It now gets just half. * https://archive.is/https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2023-09-15/houston-we-have-a-data-problem https://archive.is/https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletter...