U.S. payrolls rose by 130,000 in January, more than expected; unemployment rate at 4.3%

[moniss]

22. You cannot guarantee that someone

above the head of BLS reviewed and "made changes" to the report. I've seen that kind of maneuver in the past with environmental agencies. There is no ability to guarantee any level of integrity with respect to anything issued by this administration. To think there will be is an act of faith for which this administration has no basis for receiving.

It is not unusual for there to be people of integrity at lower levels in an organization who have been there a long time and then someone from outside the group gets power and wants things portrayed a certain way despite the facts. That is the point at which it comes down to whether you put your name to things that are issued or have the avenue or power to make public any statements of disagreement.

Often the employees are rigidly prevented from making statements outside of the organization. I am quite familiar with environmental cases where "action plans" for environmental problems that were issued by the responsible agency contained statements of "fact" that were not supported by the technical people working on the assessment/remediation plan. The agency head, a political appointee, issued the plan with stated "facts and conclusions" that were desired by the powers that be rather than what was supported by the science. Those unsupported "facts and conclusions" were used to justify particular remediation plans moving forward.

It happens at all levels sometimes and unfortunately the ability of people of integrity within the organization to raise the alarm is often limited, under threat of legal action, to simply resigning. You should take as an example the mass resignations at DOJ and note that, despite having a lot of knowledge about the things going wrong inside the department that brought them to the point of resignation, the people who resigned are not out in the public making detailed disclosures about the problems that led them to resign. The threat of legal actions against them does not end just by resigning their position.

So the bottom line is that reports come out under a signature, or not, and words of disclaimer may or may not be evident or allowed. In a normal environment trust and integrity are proven long term and reports are accepted on their face. This environment is not remotely normal and therefore that normal manner of acceptance is no longer prudent or warranted and everything must be questioned and examined as opposed to taken verbatim.