State and federal data should be above politics

As the Purdue University Fort Wayne Community Research Institute director, I rely on public state and federal data, funded by our tax dollars, that provides unique information using past and current conditions. 

Some data can be found nearly immediately like the number of weekly unemployment insurance claimants from the Indiana Department of Workforce Development. Others take almost a year like the county-level gross domestic product from the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis. Furthermore, many data sets are subject to revisions even years later. 

Much of this is produced consistently to see how things have changed over time. Reliable data practices can track how local wages are performing against national averages, how birth rates have changed, or the affordability of rental housing compared to a decade ago.

I consider these numbers trustworthy. I recognize data collection limitations and data suppression to protect privacy, which is frustrating but understood.

President Donald Trump’s decision to fire U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics Commissioner Erika McEntarfer after the BLS revised the May and June jobs numbers is somewhere between disheartening and alarming. After decades of “what gets measured gets managed,” terminating an employee based on what appears to be appropriate data revisions puts reliability of apolitical information at risk. 

Here are examples of local data available from state or federal agencies that I have used over the years:

• Number of cancer cases from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
• Percentage of the county’s gross domestic product attributed to manufacturing from the BEA
• Number of fatal traffic crashes from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration
• Number of workers who are not currently employed but actively looking for a job from the IDWD
• Percentage of low birthweight and premature infants from the Indiana Department of Health
• Annual population change attributed to births and deaths from the U.S. Census Bureau
• Number of workers commuting between counties from the Indiana Department of Revenue
• Share of renters who are considered housing burdened from the Census Bureau
• Price changes of groceries, gasoline, clothing, rent and other consumer goods and services from the BLS
• Number of bachelor’s degrees awarded from the National Center for Education Statistics
• Average monthly SNAP benefits from the Indiana Family and Social Services Administration
• Percentage of recent high school graduates going to college from the Indiana Commission on Higher Education

Available data are far from complete, yet this list represents a state and federal commitment to information in many disciplines to provide robust statistics. 

Decisions have been made on what data points to collect and perhaps on what not to. With some skill and understanding of data sets, existing numbers can be extracted and analyzed to understand what is happening. Often I compare local data to equivalent state and national numbers.

While businesses spend significant resources on proprietary market information, many of these private platforms are built from state and federal data. This can’t happen without reliable numbers collected by government. 

I get it; different administrations have different priorities, including Trump and President Joe Biden or even Govs. Mike Braun and Eric Holcomb. While data can be spun, the underlying math doesn’t care about policy but only if it is collected and compiled without an agenda. 

Manipulating a system built with bipartisan trust sets us up for unreliable data. It’s not just an academic project. They are used for calculating Social Security cost of living adjustments, plans to construct new school buildings or how to allocate transportation funds. Cutting data reliability could ripple through the economy for decades to come.  

Americans deserve evidence-based policy, not policy-based evidence.