Recently President Trump fired the director of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, saying she'd done a poor job. He was certainly correct, and its inaccuracy has been documented to go back several administrations.
The BLS routinely issues employment numbers which it subsequently "corrects" in follow-ups months later. What isn't clear is if the folk there were using methodology which (a) never produced or (b) no longer produces accurate reports or were they simply "cooking the books" for political reasons. I suspect the former.
In FedGov there is a tendency to continue using whatever methodology has worked in the past, if for no other reason than so the data can be compared with prior years' findings. For example, Social Security's records are (I kid you not) on paper stored in a hillside cavern. It worked so nobody devoted resources to update it electronically. Musk's DOGE tech guys were gob-smacked.
As long as nobody complained BLS kept doing what they've been doing every quarter for decades. This "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" mentality isn't Trump's style, so out she goes. He wants numbers with actual meaning, not projections which only later get firmed up and, too often, radically changed.
