Federal statistical system

Hi, and welcome to a special deep dive episode of the Strength in Numbers podcast.

A few months ago, I recorded a conversation with Chris Jackson, a pollster at the survey research firm SSRS, about the state of the federal statistical system.

We talked about the way the federal government gathers its data from the census to employment surveys to inflation data, what it's used for, and why you should care about all this data from the government at all.

Crucially, for things we cover on this podcast, the census is the source of many of the benchmarks we use in political polling to make sure our polls are representative of the public, to make sure we're accurately

And so we're going to talk about that in light of like all this machinery that that generates all this federal data.

But what did that like firing

represent to you? So the Bureau of Labor Statistics and really the entire federal statistical system has operated as background data infrastructure for our country for several decades and for several different administrations, Republican and Democrat, and they have a very well-earned reputation for working very hard to produce very accurate and very reliable data on our country.

And this was really something of a bright red line of the politicization or the attempted politicization of the statistical data system, where the president was trying to essentially impose his view of how things should be on our understanding of the world.