Perhaps the closest parallel to Friday’s firing happened in 1971, after the BLS reported that unemployment that June had dropped from 6.2% to 5.6% – good news for President Richard Nixon, who faced reelection the next year. When he read the following day that the bureau warned the drop might be “a statistical quirk,” he quietly reassigned the assistant BLS commissioner who had made the “quirk” comment, according to an account by Kenneth Hughes.
Ken Hughes
