Good morning. Missiles are flying across the Middle East. Israel is pounding both Beirut and Tehran with strikes, and Iran is targeting Tel Aviv. Thousands of people are fleeing. We have all the latest updates here. And President Trump fired Kristi Noem, his homeland security secretary. She’s been in the spotlight for months — wearing a Rolex watch and self-promoting as she oversaw Trump’s immigration crackdown. But after she drew even Republican frustration this week for comments before Congress, Trump announced he would replace her. Read about her rise and fall. There’s more news below. I’m going to start today, though, with the economy.
The dark economyNews doesn’t generally frustrate me. It can be good or bad, thrilling, expected or disturbing, but for the most part it doesn’t leave me on the cusp of annoyance. The jobs reports that the Bureau of Labor Statistics releases every month are an exception. They can be exasperating! Last July, for instance, the report said the U.S. had added 147,000 jobs in June. That was good news. But in August that number was revised to less than a tenth of that. Not such good news? And then last month, the June data changed again, offering bad news. Employment actually declined by 20,000 jobs in June. Job growth over the past two years had been overstated by nearly one million positions.
We’ll see the February jobs report in a couple of hours. But does it matter what it says if the government’s just going to revise the number later? That’s a question Ben Casselman, the chief economics correspondent for The Times, gets a lot. And he answered it this morning in a story about the jobs numbers that you could distill into an axiom: Context matters. As one economist told him, “Any one number can shift your understanding.” But there’s always underlying detail to examine as well, along with other data that helps paint a clearer picture of what’s actually happening in the economy — consumer spending, say, or economic anxiety, inflation, even the stock market. The monthly jobs data last year, Ben wrote, mostly showed the labor market stuck in “low-hire, low-fire” equilibrium: Employers added few jobs but didn’t lay off many employees. And the revisions didn’t really change that story. Bias-free numbersIf I’ve found the jobs reports frustrating, Trump has found them infuriating. After the revisions last summer, he fired the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, accusing her without evidence of cooking the books to make his administration look bad. Economists overwhelmingly dismissed the charge. After all, there were downward revisions during the Biden presidency, too. But Democrats worry that Trump will now pressure the bureau into producing data that he likes. There is no evidence that’s happening, Ben wrote: Current and former staffers say that the agency is using the same procedures as under past administrations, and that it would be impossible for the White House to interfere in its operations without detection. Reasons for worryWhether the data is reliable, though, remains a complicated question to answer. Last month’s report said employers added just 181,000 jobs in 2025. That was 69 percent fewer than its initial estimate of 584,000. There was a downward revision a year earlier that was nearly as large. Ben explained why that happened: Economists are optimistic that the big revisions are at least partly the result of temporary factors and that the data will become more reliable going forward. The Covid-19 pandemic led to waves of business openings and closures, which are difficult for the government to track in real time, and upended the seasonal patterns that statisticians try to account for in their estimates. The surge in immigration in the early years of the Biden administration, and the sharp decline later in his term and under Mr. Trump, have broken models that were built for much more gradual demographic shifts. They’re optimistic but guarded, Ben reports. Budgets are shrinking, as is the size of the agency. Response rates to the surveys that make up the bulk of the data are declining. And government shutdowns don’t help, either. “There’s good reason to be concerned that the quality of our statistics is going to deteriorate,” another economist said. “Even before this administration, there was reason to be concerned. The agencies have been fighting an uphill battle for years.” Still, Ben explains here why it’s important not to dismiss the numbers. He’s convincing. Now I’m looking forward to seeing the new ones later this morning.
Trump has had no qualms with using the word “war” to describe the fighting between the U.S., Israel and Iran. “We’re doing very well on the war front,” he told reporters this week. Not so for many others in his party. Republicans on Capitol Hill have contorted themselves to avoid the word, Annie Karni writes, calling it a “major combat operation,” a “mission” and “hostilities.” Why? “We haven’t declared war,” said Senator Markwayne Mullin, Republican of Oklahoma and Trump’s new selection to lead homeland security. If Trump is waging war without congressional say-so, he might be acting outside constitutional boundaries. When a reporter reminded Mullin that he had used the word himself, he replied, “That was a misspoke.” More on Trump’s power
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