Iowans know: Don't play with job numbers

No numbers are harmed in the making of our reports.

Catchy, isn’t it? And it’s been our commitment at Common Good Iowa, just as it was for the two organizations that merged in 2020 to create CGI, the Iowa Policy Project and the Child and Family Policy Center.

Not everyone shares that commitment. The firing of the head of the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) is only the latest example. And it’s a problem.[1]

In an era dominated by political spin on a scale and at a speed Americans have never seen, we must be able to count on facts, on data, and on solid analysis based upon them. President Trump’s interference at BLS defies that.

We’ve seen this type of tampering in Iowa, by the way. In 2010, former Governor Terry Branstad made a political comeback promising 200,000 new jobs in five years. Optimistic, yes, ambitious, certainly — but there was nothing about it that was not cynical. In an economy that at the time supported not quite 1.48 million jobs, an increase to nearly 1.68 million (14%) would have been stunning.

Good politics, if not terribly realistic. Once elected, Branstad had a way out: He could distort the numbers. And magically, the Iowa Workforce Development official spreadsheet of monthly job numbers from — you guessed it, BLS — carried an extra calculation, for “Gross Over-the-month Employment Gains,” a nonsensical count that started January 2011 — the month Branstad took office.

Here’s how it worked: There are 11 major job categories in the count each month from BLS. Instead of compiling the positive and negative change in each category to show how overall jobs changed in a given month — a net job change — the Governor’s line on the spreadsheet counted only the positive numbers each month from categories that showed gains.

As he neared the five-year deadline, Branstad claimed victory, that Iowa had reached the magic 200,000 number he’d set. In fact, he was only about halfway there using real math.[2]

Now, Trump could — and might yet — do roughly the same thing with the national numbers under the new director of BLS. It would be one possible approach, anyway. And whatever happens with the BLS, we can hope serious people can sort through whatever data is provided and make sense of it, as serious people in Iowa did with Branstad’s gamesmanship.[3]

Oh, and in case you were wondering, in the eight-plus years since Branstad resigned for a Trump ambassadorship and turned over the reins as Governor to Kim Reynolds, Iowa still has not reached Branstad's goal of 200,000 new jobs. The latest job report shows us still about 84,000 short.

Mike Owen is deputy director of Common Good Iowa. Contact: mowen@commongoodiowa.org.