No matter who's in power and all intentional data manipulation withstanding, the simple fact is that these metrics contain pro-intervention assumptions and are by nature political.

The following article was originally published by the Mises Institute. The opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect those of Peter Schiff or SchiffGold.

In the age of Trump, even the most boring of political positions can find themselves in the center of the political news cycle. In recent weeks, it has been the Bureau of Labor Statistics. After severe revisions to previous job reports, Trump fired BLS Commissioner Erika McEntarfer and has nominated E.J. Antoni, who—if nothing else—has claimed to be a fan of Murray Rothbard.

Usually a changing of the guard at a position such as this would go on with little fanfare. In fact, one of the reasons why BLS Commissioners typically overlap from presidential administration to presidential administration is that it has traditionally been seen as a low-priority position for a president's agenda.

So why has this become an issue now?

The obvious answer is that President Trump is a man who cares about headlines and his social media venting about the disastrous job numbers understandably raises the spectre of concern about the "politicalization" of the statistics bureau. The fact that bad jobs data would traditionally be viewed as an asset in his feud with crusade for rate cuts from the Federal Reserve is secondary to his desire to project his vision of a "Golden Age."

The backlash to Trump's focus on BLS is predictable, but also revealing. After all, what is not in question is the bad track record of monthly BLS data in recent years. The news that sparked Trump's fury wasn't just the economy underperforming in the area of job creation, but significant revisions downwards from previous reports. This was also true under the prior administration.

While revisions to BLS data isn't new, the unreliability of their monthly reports have increased in recent years. One clear issue is that survey participation rates used to form their original report have fallen as low as under 43 percent, resulting in estimates increasingly reliant upon projections and modeling. These rates improve in later reports, resulting in the significant revisions.

Antoni has pointed to these underlying issues as a potential reason to suspend the monthly jobs report in favor of just releasing the more accurate quarterly report, which was met by horrifying gasps from critics. While it's easy to identify a political motivation in preventing unflattering economic data from being released to the public, it is worth noting that it is the inaccurate monthly reports that have projected a rosier depiction of the economy.