Even conservative economists are saying that Trump’s pick to lead BLS is essentially a partisan ideological hack whose work is clearly biased and riddled with mistakes.
Trump fired the former BLS leader because he didn’t like the poor job numbers.
Economic data helps us know what’s going on in the country. If hacks lead the agencies that produce the data, we won’t be able to trust the data, and leaders and citizens won’t have this basic information to help them make decisions.
“in June, vaccine manufacturer Moderna reported the results of a clinical trial pitting its mRNA influenza vaccine against both high-dose and standard-dose licensed seasonal influenza vaccines. The conventional vaccines used inactivated flu viruses to induce an immune response. Moderna’s mRNA-1010 achieved a relative vaccine efficacy against influenza illness of 26.6 percent in the trial. That means that the mRNA-1010 group had 26.6 percent fewer influenza cases than the group that got the standard-dose flu shot. For example, if the standard flu vaccine group had 100 cases per 1,000 people, the mRNA-1010 group would have had about 73–74 cases per 1,000.
The clinical trial roundly contradicts RFK Jr.’s claim that mRNA vaccines fail to protect effectively against upper respiratory infections, especially in comparison to old-fashioned flu vaccines.
…
A simple Google Scholar search for mRNA vaccine trials for infectious diseases turns up over 10,000 results for just 2025 alone. But let’s just take a look at a comprehensive new review of promising vaccine formulations for emerging infectious diseases. In that study, a team of Korean researchers compares the pros and cons of different vaccine production platforms, including whole-organism-based, live-attenuated, subunit, virus vector-based immunity, and nucleic acid-based (DNA and RNA) vaccines.
The researchers’ analysis concludes that “mRNA vaccine formulations offer significant advantages, such as rapid development and production, over other vaccine platforms.” They also note that it is “necessary to develop an analysis system that can verify the effectiveness and safety of the mRNA vaccine, as well as the development process of the vaccine itself.” Just what the now-cancelled BARDA mRNA vaccine contracts could have helped to figure out.
…
These vaccines might indeed have a significant impact on mitigating the spread of infectious diseases, if RFK Jr. would just stop standing athwart biomedical progress yelling, “Stop.””
“The federal teams that count public health problems are disappearing — putting efforts to solve those problems in jeopardy.
Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s purge of tens of thousands of federal workers has halted efforts to collect data on everything from cancer rates in firefighters to mother-to-baby transmission of HIV and syphilis to outbreaks of drug-resistant gonorrhea to cases of carbon monoxide poisoning.
The cuts threaten to obscure the severity of pressing health threats and whether they’re getting better or worse, leaving officials clueless on how to respond.”
“The Trump administration has dismissed advisers to key statistical agencies behind major economic reports, sparking warnings that the cuts will jeopardize the quality of data critical to policymakers and Wall Street investors.
Economists, academics and corporate officials serving on a board of unpaid advisers to the Labor Department’s statistical bureau were told this week they were no longer needed, two of the former members told POLITICO. Similar committees that advised the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Economic Analysis and the Census Bureau have also been let go. And the Federal Housing Finance Authority placed workers who assisted with its widely cited home price index on administrative leave Wednesday.”
“What happens when one of the world’s largest repositories of free information becomes unreliable?
That dire situation came to pass in late January, when many federal websites took down entire datasets to avoid possibly violating a series of executive orders from President Donald Trump. At the same time, the Department of Government Efficiency, the Elon Musk-directed task force that is slashing government operations, has canceled contracts for the collection of data and cut workers who analyze and evaluate information about various facets of American life, such as education, housing and consumer protection. These developments led to widespread concern that some data that researchers have long relied on the government to collect would no longer be readily available, potentially hindering various initiatives meant to help Americans — both inside and outside of government.
Although some information has come back online, the availability and transparency of government-collected data is suddenly no longer a given. This isn’t a worry just for data journalists like us, either. Experts I spoke with laid out how the public and private sector, companies large and small, and even the average person use government data to make decisions about program effectiveness, business prospects and life choices. With this in mind, I delved into this recent interruption in data access, why this data has significant value and what challenges may lie ahead if government data becomes less accessible and reliable moving forward.”
“DOGE deserves some credit for simply trying to map the federal government—a gargantuan endeavor that involves over 100 agencies, each a matryoshka doll of sub-agencies and offices. As former federal technology officer Marina Nitze wrote in Reason today, the amount of nonsensical rules, regulations, and turf battles means it’s a Sisyphean struggle to make even the most basic improvements to federal websites and tech systems.”
“Whether you’re hot or cold on DOGE’s government-slashing potential, everyone agrees it needs data to survive. Record access lawsuits might starve it of them.”
“In the initial days of the Trump administration, officials scoured federal websites for any mention of what they deemed “DEI” keywords — terms as generic as “diverse” and “historically” and even “women.” They soon identified reams of some of the country’s most valuable public health data containing some of the targeted words, including language about LGBTQ+ people, and quickly took down much of it — from surveys on obesity and suicide rates to real-time reports on immediate infectious disease threats like bird flu.
The removal elicited a swift response from public health experts who warned that without this data, the country risked being in the dark about important health trends that shape life-and-death public health decisions made in communities across the country.
Some of this data was restored in a matter of days, but much of it was incomplete. In some cases, the raw data sheets were posted again, but the reference documents that would allow most people to decipher them were not. Meanwhile, health data continues to be taken down: The New York Times reported last week that data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on bird flu transmission between humans and cats had been posted and then promptly removed.”
“The opaque office’s early moves have violated the Privacy Act and cybersecurity laws, according to legal experts, and triggered a lawsuit challenging the Trump administration’s assault on government bureaucracy.
Legal and security experts are particularly exercised by Musk’s move to shutter the U.S. Agency for International Development and take control of the Treasury Department’s central payments database.
“The scale here is unprecedented in terms of the risk to sensitive personal and financial information,” said Alan Butler of the Electronic Privacy Information Center. “It’s an absolute nightmare.”
The Musk-led effort to gain entry into Treasury’s huge payment database drew a lawsuit Monday from two major federal employee unions and left some lawyers who specialize in regulation of such data nearly apoplectic.
Mary Ellen Callahan, former Chief Privacy Officer at the Department of Homeland Security, called DOGE’s access “a data breach of exponential proportions.” “If we lose control of that data, we’ve lost control forever,” she said.”
…
“Other lawyers said DOGE’s access could also violate cybersecurity-related laws, like the Federal Information Security Modernization Act of 2002.
Reports that career employees at the Office of Personnel Management were locked out of key databases by DOGE personnel also triggered deep concern Monday among legal and security experts. A key OPM database was breached by hackers in 2013, prompting widespread outrage from lawmakers and federal workers. The U.S. government blamed the hack on China and said the data could be used to target or enlist federal employees in espionage.
“They’re not following the law, they’re not following any semblance of best practice, they’re just hacking and slashing government IT systems in a way that threatens national security and puts everyone at risk,” Butler said.
Claims by Musk that he is shutting down USAID were met with widespread skepticism as well. USAID was created through an executive order issued by President John F. Kennedy in 1961. But it was formally established as a federal government agency by Congress in 1998, creating doubts about Trump’s authority to simply abolish it or, as Secretary of State Marco Rubio has suggested, fold it into the State Department.
“I think it’s the most clearly unconstitutional act that he’s doing,” said Alex Joel, an adjunct professor of law at American University. “He can’t just destroy the whole agency.””