It’s not often that the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) is a trending topic on Twitter. But with Director Keith Hall’s budget scorekeeper about to weigh in on the coverage, cost and deficit impacts of the Republicans’ so-called “replacement” of the Affordable Care Act, all eyes are on the CBO. And given its consistent record of forecasting that Obamacare will enable health insurance coverage for millions of Americans while reducing the national debt, it’s no wonder Hall’s team is being accused by the GOP of producing “lies” and “budget gimmickry” which is “meaningless.”
But there’s another reason the Trump administration and its GOP allies should worry about the CBO boss Congressional Republicans themselves selected. As it turns out, Keith Hall long ago debunked their myth-making about the Obama administration cooking up bogus jobs numbers.
Boasting about February’s strong jobs report, Trump Press Secretary Sean Spicer joked, “They may have been phony in the past, but it's very real now.” As then Treasury nominee Steve Mnuchin declared on January 19, the past ended only on Inauguration Day. “The unemployment rate is not real," Mnuchin told the Senate Finance Committee. "I've traveled for the last year. I've seen this. And the president-elect understands that very clearly.” And despite acknowledging that the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) had done nothing to change its methodology since Donald Trump took the oath of office, Office of Management and Budget (OMB) chief Mick Mulvaney nevertheless announced yesterday:
"We've thought for a long time, I did, that the Obama administration was manipulating the numbers in terms of the number of people in the workforce to make the unemployment rate, that percentage rate, look smaller than it actually was.”
CBO’s Keith Hall begs to differ. When the Jack Welch and other Republican mouthpieces first tried to cast doubt on the integrity of the jobs and unemployment numbers during the 2012 presidential campaign, the former BLS Commissioner was having none of it. Hall, a Bush nominee who ran the BLS from 2008 to 2012, told the Wall Street Journal that it is simply “impossible” to alter the jobs numbers for political advantage.
Keith Hall, who served as Commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics from 2008 until 2012, said in an interview Friday that there is no way someone at the agency could change any of the data from its two monthly employment surveys. The significant improvement in the unemployment rate may reflect normal statistical errors in the sampling process, he said, but that has nothing to do with manipulation.
“There’s nothing wrong with the numbers,” said Mr. Hall. “The only issue is the interpretation of the numbers. The numbers are what they are.”
Writing in the Washington Post at the time, Dylan Matthews explained the methodology and process behind the jobs numbers. The BLS--an agency created in 1884—Matthews concluded, is “an nonpartisan as it gets.” For his part, Hall agreed, explaining “I feel like I’m a certified economic geek rather than a political person.” Hall, then a research at the usually conservative Mercatus Center at George Mason University, summed up the output of the monthly surveys of 50,000 households and 400,000 businesses this way:
"I think it would be impossible to really manipulate the numbers. Certainly, it would be impossible to manipulate the numbers and not be found out."
As for Mick Mulvaney, Steve Mnuchin and Donald Trump’s claims of manipulation, they were long ago found out by Keith Hall. They can only hope Hall and the Congressional Budget Office he heads is kinder to them on Trumpcare.