As President Trump and his chainsaw, Elon Musk, dismantle the federal government, economists are starting to worry that one casualty could be the lifeblood of their profession: data.

Government figures on growth, employment, inflation, and myriad other things are essential to evaluating the economy, the investing climate, the business environment, and congressional spending priorities. There are many other sources of economic data, but official government reports are the baseline for much of it.

Messing with the government’s official economic data is almost unthinkable. Yet Trump and his team are thinking about it. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick has raised the idea of revising the way the government measures GDP , or the nation’s total economic output. Lutnick wants to strip government spending out of the equation, even though that’s been part of the GDP computation for nearly a century.

Economists almost universally think that would be a bad idea . But Lutnick may not care what economists think. His scheme could make the economy look stronger than it is if the president's henchmen generate a sharp contraction in government activity, perhaps even providing statistical cover for Trump to deny there’s a recession if it gets that bad.

From there, it’s easy to foresee Trump gaming government data on employment, inflation, and many other aspects of the economy.

Trump is already on an unprecedented mission to politicize the whole government, replacing scores of career civil servants with loyalists who will do whatever he demands. He has already violated the sanctity of data embargoes meant to prevent insiders from gaining a trading edge. And Trump routinely touts the economy under his watch as the best ever , regardless of the reality.

The next logical step would be ordering the official statisticians to come up with some numbers to prove it.

Such an effort may already be underway. Lutnick has disbanded two groups of economists that routinely advise the government on how to make its data more accurate. That will leave fewer outsiders eyeballing how the feds crunch the numbers. Musk's firing effort could also ensnare some of the younger "probationary" workers who collect data in huge surveys such as the monthly jobs report.

"There's a lot of concern over the integrity of the data going forward," Morgan Stanley economist Ellen Zentner told Bloomberg on March 7 .

The problem for Trump is that fudging the numbers won’t work. We just went through a long experiment, known as the Biden administration, in which a president bombarded voters with data meant to demonstrate how strong the economy was. And those numbers were real. Voters never bought it, because what they saw in their own lives didn’t fit with what the numbers supposedly said.

Drop Rick Newman a note , follow him on Bluesky , or sign up for his newsletter .

While running for reelection in 2024, and then supporting Kamala Harris after he dropped out, Biden repeatedly bragged about record job numbers and strong GDP growth during his presidency. Biden didn’t need to rig the numbers. He was right on both counts.

Biden also acknowledged that inflation was too high, while pointing out that it had dropped sharply from the 9% peak in 2022 to just 2.5% by the fall of 2024. Also correct.

The pitch obviously failed.

Voters chose Trump over Harris in the 2024 presidential election as a vote against the Biden economy. It didn’t matter that inflation was nearly back to a normal range by Election Day. What did matter was that prices had jumped and mostly settled at those elevated levels. Rents rose, making it harder to afford the biggest monthly expense. Working-class Americans felt they were falling behind and no Biden statistic was going to convince them otherwise.

The most important metric in the US economy isn’t a government dataset. It’s the family budget. Most Americans don’t know or even care what the GDP growth rate or unemployment rate or inflation rate is. But they know better than any politician or economist how far their paycheck goes. And there was nothing Biden could say to negate the assessment of many voters that their paycheck was thinning out.

Like everything else in America, the economy is now political.

Republicans promptly got more optimistic about the economy after Trump won last November, while Democrats got gloomier. That means Trump’s most loyal supporters will probably believe whatever he says about the economy. The bank could be foreclosing on their homes while they keep the faith that Trump will somehow deliver.

But elections don’t turn on the stalwarts occupying the far left or right. There’s a large middle — centrists, moderates, Independents — who are always the swing votes in elections. And the weather vanes who can push the president’s approval rating to a buoyant 55% if things are good, or a dismal 35% if things are lousy.

If layoffs mount, inflation spikes, or markets tank, there’s no chance a Trump ministry of propaganda will be able to paper over the gloom among the sensible middle. One unemployed person with lost income can be a burden on five others, no matter what the unemployment rate is. When an important local employer starts laying off workers, everybody in town knows it and gets worried about their own job security. When 401(k) retirement plans lose 10% or 20% of their value, everybody thinking about retirement feels less well-off and more worried about the future.

If the Trump economy does turn south, Trump seems likely to push his own rosier narrative, as he has done many times before .

If he goes as far as falsifying government data, that will unnerve markets already rattled by punitive tariffs and Trump’s general aura of chaos, probably making a faltering economy even more fragile. Worst of all for Trump, he will lose credibility with voters if he’s telling them they’re better off than they know they are.

Biden tried and failed. Trump was supposed to be the antidote to that.

Rick Newman is a senior columnist for Yahoo Finance . Follow him on Bluesky and X : @rickjnewman.

.