Today, baseless conspiracy theories aside, it's getting harder for the Bureau of Labor Statistics to produce accurate jobs data. Plus: Seth Rogen cleans up at the Emmys.

📢 Sign up now for the inaugural Trendlines webinar, where the Globe's Dana Gerber and I will break down President Trump's pressure campaign on higher education. Tune in on Sept. 30 at noon.

President Trump didn't need to invent a conspiracy to highlight the shortcomings of the government's employment statistics.

Trump last month fired Erika McEntarfer, commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, after the agency's July jobs report showed a sharp drop in hiring and large downward revisions to prior months' data.

The monthly payroll estimates have seen some big revisions, the president said in a social media post announcing McEntarfer's removal. That's true. But he also claimed BLS rigged its reports to make him look bad -- a preposterous charge for which he offered no evidence.

It was more than a shoot-the-messenger moment from a president well-versed in political theater.

As employment and other indicators point to a slowdown, Trump appears intent on undermining BLS's credibility. Perhaps then he can insist -- as he did when dismissing McEntarfer -- that the economy is "BOOMING" regardless of what the data show.

The monthly payroll numbers are based on a survey with built-in limitations and intended to be updated several times as new information becomes available. Economists say the process is a tradeoff between speed and accuracy.

They also say there's room for improvement.

"Surveys are never 100 percent accurate," said Eric Rosengren, a former president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston.

Both Republicans and Democrats have squeezed BLS's funding, and with more adequate resources, "we could get a more accurate estimate," he said.

High on the priority list, experts say, is reducing the reliance on surveys by speeding up the availability of state unemployment and tax data.

The latest: The Labor Department's inspector general's office said Wednesday it was "initiating a review of the challenges that the Bureau of Labor Statistics encounters collecting and reporting closely watched economic data."

The announcement came a day after BLS's annual payroll revision showed employers had added 911,000 fewer jobs in the 12 months through March 2025 than previously reported. It was the largest net revision in history (excluding the pandemic.)

The inspector general's notice didn't spell out the details of its review. But E.J. Antoni, the conservative economist whose nomination to take over BLS is awaiting a Senate vote, has advocated for sweeping changes.

"I think you really need a complete overhaul at the BLS," he said in a podcast shortly before being tapped by Trump. "You need to . . . make sure things are actually modeled to reflect reality today, not just a time in the past."

Yet the Trump administration recently disbanded two volunteer committees that advised BLS.

Big picture: The BLS release -- officially called the Employment Situation Summary -- is the most important monthly economic gauge, followed closely by the agency's inflation data.

It provides a snapshot of hiring and wages derived from about 121,000 workplaces. BLS runs a separate survey of 60,000 households that generates the unemployment rate and other labor force statistics.

The reports influence everything from Federal Reserve interest rate policy to trading in financial markets and business investment decisions.

But: BLS updates its monthly jobs tallies in each of the subsequent two months to incorporate late responses from employers.

Sometimes, the changes are significant. The payroll count for May, originally reported as a gain of 14,000 jobs, was later changed to a loss of 13,000, the first decline since the end of 2020.

Each year, BLS also reviews its reports against more detailed unemployment and tax data from the states and issues a "benchmark" revision. This led to the 900,000-plus reduction in hiring for the year through March.

Why it matters: The reliance on revisions means BLS data can be late in flagging pivot points in the economy.

The employer survey also doesn't adequately capture workers not covered by a W-2 form, including gig workers and freelancers, said Liya Palagashvili, a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. "It's a huge workforce, and it's growing."

Palagashvili, a former member of the now-defunct BLS data user advisory committee, believes the government should fund an effort to generate state-level data on a more timely basis, which would improve the accuracy of the hiring numbers.

"R&D is needed to lessen the reliance on surveys," she said.

Final thought: As is often the case with Trump, there is a kernel of truth in even his most outrageous claims.

"Statistical agencies are judged by their accuracy," said Keith Hall, who served as BLS commissioner during the first Obama. "If there is a decrease in accuracy, it's well within the administration's right to demand answers to why."

But Trump has buried legitimate questions about BLS under a heap of conspiratorial nonsense. Like his attack on the Federal Reserve, the motivation doesn't seem to be reform but consolidation of power.

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"I saw what good public education can do to uplift kids from humble beginnings."

-- Retired Apple executive Daniel Riccio, on why he's donating $50 million over 10 years to UMass Amherst, his alma mater.

You can't do that: Attorney General Andrea Joy Campbell filed a lawsuit against KalshiEX LLC, an online prediction market, for allegedly operating online sports betting without a license from the state.

Changing hands: Boston home-security provider SimpliSafe has been sold to another private equity firm.

Raking it in: Buyout firm Advent, of Boston, has raised $20 billion for its flagship fund since the start of the year, according to Bloomberg, defying a challenging fundraising environment.

Biotech winter: Boston startups, jobs, and science are being swept away, Globe correspondent Kara Miller writes.

Tough call: Federal Reserve officials meeting this week to decide whether to lower interest rates face rising inflation, a slowing job market, and unprecedented political attacks.

Spiked: Karen Attiah, an opinion columnist for The Washington Post, said she was fired after posting on social media about gun violence and "racial double standards" following the assassination of right-wing influencer Charlie Kirk.

-- Google parent Alphabet's market value after its stock rose on Monday, joining Nvidia, Microsoft, and Apple as the only companies to trade at more than $3 trillion.

"I'm legitimately embarrassed by how happy this makes me."

That was Seth Rogen after winning his third Emmy of the night on Sunday.

Rogen took home statues for best actor, best writing, and best directing for a comedy series for "The Studio," the Apple TV+ series he co-created. The show, a sendup of Hollywood, also won best comedy, for a total of 13 awards, a record for that category.

Rogen has come a long way from "Freaks and Geeks," the teen comedy-drama that ran for just one season in 1999-2000 but became a cult classic. He appeared alongside several young actors who went on to be stars, including Linda Cardellini, James Franco, and Jason Segel.

🔌 Shameless plug: You can catch me on the latest episode of the Econofact Chats podcast: "Taking Stock of the Economy: Fed Independence, Tariff Uncertainty, and a Shrinking Workforce." Also appearing are jounalists Binyamin Appelbaum of The New York Times, Scott Horsley of National Public Radio, Claire Jones of The Financial Times, and host Michael Klein of the Fletchers School at Tufts University.

📆 On this date in 2008, as a result of the subprime mortgage crisis, Lehman Brothers filed for Chapter 11 in the largest bankruptcy filing in US history.

Trump's conspiracy nonsense clouds real concerns about economic data - The Boston Globe