Comments from a member of President Trump’s cabinet over the weekend have renewed concerns that the new administration could seek to interfere with federal statistics — especially if they start to show that the economy is slipping into a recession.
In an interview on Fox News on Sunday, Howard Lutnick, the commerce secretary, suggested that he planned to change the way the government reports data on gross domestic product in order to remove the impact of government spending.
“You know that governments historically have messed with G.D.P.,” he said. “They count government spending as part of G.D.P. So I’m going to separate those two and make it transparent.”
It wasn’t immediately clear what Mr. Lutnick meant. The basic definition of gross domestic product is widely accepted internationally and has been unchanged for decades. It tallies consumer spending, private-sector investment, net exports, and government investment and spending to arrive at a broad measure of all goods and services produced in a country.
The Bureau of Economic Analysis, which is part of Mr. Lutnick’s department, already produces a detailed breakdown of G.D.P. into its component parts. Many economists focus on a measure — known as “final sales to private domestic purchasers” — that excludes government spending and is often seen as a better indicator of underlying demand in the economy. That measure has generally shown stronger growth in recent quarters than overall G.D.P. figures.
In recent weeks, however, there have been mounting signs elsewhere that the economy could be losing momentum. Consumer spending fell unexpectedly in January, applications for unemployment insurance have been creeping upward, and measures of housing construction and home sales have turned down. A forecasting model from the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta predicts that G.D.P. could contract sharply in the first quarter of the year, although most private forecasters still expect modest growth.
Cuts to federal spending and the federal work force could act as a further drag on economic growth in coming months. Removing federal spending from G.D.P. calculations, therefore, could obscure the impact of the administration’s policies.
“The implication is that it is OK to manipulate economic data for political gain,” said David Wilcox, a fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics and director of U.S. economic research at Bloomberg Economics, who used to be the director of research and statistics at the Federal Reserve.
Mr. Lutnick made his comments days after similar ones by Elon Musk, the billionaire entrepreneur who has become a pivotal player behind many of the administration’s policies. Writing on social media, Mr. Musk said on Friday that excluding government spending would result in a more “accurate” measure of G.D.P.
“Otherwise, you can scale G.D.P. artificially high by spending money on things that don’t make people’s lives better,” Mr. Musk wrote on X, the social media site he owns.
Economists have long recognized that G.D.P., which attempts to measure all the goods and services produced in the country, is an imperfect measure of the economic output, let alone of individual well-being. And government services are particularly hard to measure, because they often don’t have a value set by the market.
Still, excluding the government’s contribution entirely makes little sense, economists said. That would imply that teachers at private schools contributed to the national economy but that teachers at public schools did not, for example. And it would mean that government investment in infrastructure, health care, disaster relief and national defense all held no economic value.
“Whether a federal agency buys pencils or a private business buys pencils, you want to measure that pencils were bought,” said Wendy Edelberg, director of the Hamilton Project, an economic policy arm of the Brookings Institution. “It doesn’t matter who’s doing the buying.”
Government spending has contributed to G.D.P. growth in recent years, but it hasn’t played an outsize role. Even without the government’s contribution, G.D.P. would have grown at a more than 2 percent rate in both 2023 and 2024. Government spending detracted from growth in 2022.
Federal statistical agencies have long operated with a degree of autonomy from the cabinet departments that they are nominally part of, following methodologies developed by technocrats inside and outside government. But experts in recent years have warned that independence rests more on norms than on statutory protections, and that the agencies could therefore be vulnerable to political interference.
Nancy Potok, who was appointed chief statistician for the United States by President Barack Obama and remained in the role for much of President Trump’s first term, said Mr. Lutnick’s comments were a sign that those fears could be becoming reality.
“It’s very concerning,” she said. “It puts the U.S. in the company of countries that are notorious for fudging the numbers to support failed economic policies.”
Even before Mr. Lutnick’s comments, users of government data had become increasingly concerned about the possibility of political interference.
In the early weeks of the new administration, numerous government data sets were taken offline — some have since been restored — and some data-collection projects have been canceled. Experts have also expressed concern about the impact that layoffs and budget cuts could have on the statistical agencies, which were already struggling to collect data at a time of falling survey response rates.
More recently, the Commerce Department moved to kill off several advisory committees that provided feedback and guidance to federal statistical agencies. Members of the committees — mostly experts from the private and nonprofit sectors who were not paid for their work — received emails on Tuesday informing them that their committees’ purposes “have been fulfilled” and that the groups were “terminated effective Feb. 28.”
The advisory committees had little public profile and no decision-making authority. But their sudden termination could add to concerns about the Trump administration’s approach to the statistical agencies.
“It’s very disconcerting,” said Mary Jo Mitchell, who was a member of a Census Bureau advisory committee. “These committees were important avenues for ensuring that the bureau was receiving input from experts and stakeholders who care about these issues.”
If political leaders interfere with the data — or even if the public loses faith in the reliability of official statistics — it could make it harder for businesses and policymakers to make decisions, said Maurine Haver, president of Haver Analytics, an economic and financial data provider.
“We depend on high-quality, timely government data,” she said. “Businesses, the Fed, the government themselves depend on these data to tell us all what’s going on.”
Still, economists were skeptical that the administration would be able to suppress evidence of a recession if one were to occur. If cuts to government spending lead to private-sector job losses and rising unemployment, the public will notice.
“You can do what you want to the data, you’re not going to change people’s lived experience,” Ms. Edelberg said. “You’re not going to hide the fact of a recession from the public by changing the numbers.”
