We have a saying here at Bloomberg, and it’s one we brought with us to New York City Hall: “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.” The federal government is now in danger of proving just how much truth those words hold.
For more than a century, Republicans and Democrats have agreed on the need for objective data to inform their debates. In the 1890s, when the Senate commissioned a novel study of prices and wages — partly to assess the impact of the McKinley Tariff Act — Senator Nelson Aldrich, a Republican and staunch protectionist, explained the rationale:
There was no expectation that the members of the committee would agree about the political or even the economic bearings of the facts ascertained; but all were desirous that hereafter there should be no reason to question the integrity of the facts.
Or, as New York Senator Pat Moynihan would later put it, “Everyone is entitled to their own opinions, but not their own facts.”
Those common-sense and bipartisan sentiments helped produce a statistical system that became widely recognized as the global gold standard, one that delivers immense value for American citizens for its relatively modest cost, about 0.1% of the federal budget. The categories of data collection are endless — inflation, employment, jobs, wages, trade, housing, crime, population, pollution, disease, investment, consumer spending, food production and so many others — because they are invaluable.
Government officials rely on this data as they make decisions about allocating resources to tackle problems, and as they try to determine whether policies and programs are working. If you think government is inefficient and ineffective now, wait until you see it operate without good data.
Business leaders are even more dependent on this data as they make planning and investment decisions, from retailers figuring out where to locate a store, to farmers and ranchers weighing how much of their production to hedge, to manufacturers deliberating whether to expand their plants.
Nevertheless, the administration has been undermining the integrity of the country’s statistical system by playing politics with it. When, for example, the Bureau of Labor Statistics delivered a downbeat jobs report last year, the president abruptly fired its commissioner. After introducing deep cuts in food stamps for the poor, officials canceled a survey measuring how many people were going hungry. Data on inflation, education, farm wages, police misconduct and federal employee morale have also suffered or disappeared amid staff and budget reductions.