To President Trump, the veracity of statistics and scorekeepers can turn on a dime. When data works in his favor, he praises, repeats and often exaggerates the figures. When the numbers on crime or the economy run counter to his narrative, they are frequently deemed fake, phony and a fraud. In his second term, he has escalated attacks on independent data, including firing the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics after an unfavorable jobs report,
A U.S. Census Bureau advisory committee made up of scientific experts that was axed by the Trump administration earlier this year is resurrecting itself and meeting Thursday with no official blessing or formal ties to the statistical agency. The reconstitution of the Census Scientific Advisory Committee, rechristened with an Independent in front of its name, is a defiant gesture by the research community against the Trump administration's elimination last winter of three advisory committees made up of outside experts from private industry and academia.
In 1937, Joseph Stalin commissioned a sweeping census of the Soviet Union. The data reflected some uncomfortable facts in particular, the dampening of population growth in areas devastated by the 1933 famine and so Stalin's government suppressed the release of the survey results. Several high-level government statistical workers responsible for the census were subsequently imprisoned and apparently executed. Though the Soviet authorities would proudly trumpet national statistics that glorified the USSR's achievements, any numbers that did not fit the preferred narrative were buried.