Six . . . five . . . four . . .
An economic adviser to Newt Gingrich drafted a memo to his boss, anticipating “some weak numbers” and suggesting his candidate compare this recovery with the more robust one under President Ronald Reagan.
U.S. employers added 227,000 jobs in February to complete three of the best months of hiring since the recession began.
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“Based on one report, it’s as if the president’s full economic agenda is either brilliant or moronic,” said Jared Bernstein, a former chief economist for Vice President Biden. “Get good numbers and you’re Keynes reincarnate. Get bad numbers and you can’t add.
“It’s all or nothing.”
‘You dream in numbers’
Karen Kosanovich had been working through the numbers in her high-walled cubicle for the past eight days, trying to turn 110,000 lines of raw data into a precise summary understandable to the general public. Empty cans of Red Bull sat on one side of her desk. Folders labeled “CLASSIFIED DATA” stacked high on the other. She had helped compile the past 164 employment situation reports, but still each month began with the same sense of improbability.
“You come in early. You go home late. You dream in numbers,” she said. “The whole process can start to consume you.”
The raw data had arrived at the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), like always, on Wednesday the week before the report’s release: millions of characters representing survey information from 55,000 households; and then, a few days later, monthly payroll data from 486,000 businesses. Kosanovich’s boss posted a two-page schedule on the office wall, detailing the tasks ahead for a team of more than 20 economists. They would be required to make a series of six deadlines. Their work would undergo 15 fact checks and then 15 clearance reviews. They would sit together in a windowless conference room and read aloud from their eventual creation, a three-page news release and 24 data tables, debating commas and verbs for hours on end.
They would do it all with absolute discretion during an eight-day security lockdown, signing confidentiality agreements each morning, encrypting their computers and locking data into a safe every time they walked 10 yards away to use a bathroom. “Is your workstation secure?” asked a sign in the hallway. They all remembered the last security miscue, in November 2008 — the accidental transmission of some data to one wire service a full 25 seconds before the report’s scheduled release, an incident that had necessitated a series of internal investigations and revisions.
“We always tape paper over the windows of the conference room or draw the shades,” Kosanovich said about her typical routine during a lockdown. She made a habit of refraining from answering phone calls or e-mails from unknown numbers and never discussing data outside her office. For eight days, nobody visited her team’s floor at BLS without a security clearance. The custodial staff did not empty their trash until the report was released.
The lockdown was an exercise in tedium and precision, but those have been the hallmarks of BLS for 125 years. The agency remains strictly nonpartisan and intentionally bland. It measures the economy without ever opining on it. “The glass here is never half-empty or half-full,” Kosanovich said, repeating a popular BLS motto. “It’s an eight-ounce glass with four ounces of liquid.”
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