A series of comments from Trump officials in recent days has raised concerns that the administration can try to examine differently a key economic measure of American economic health: quarterly reading of the gross domestic product (GDP).
It is an idea under study, but its exact form is not clear. Elon Musk is The most vocal promoter of the ideaSaying that “more precise measure of GDP excludes public spending”.
In question is that the government already publishes precisely such a figure known as the name The added value by private industries (VAPI). But the fact that Musk pushes him in the middle of his work Doge – another Trump official went further by suggesting that it may be possible to choose public spending – has raised questions about the question of whether it is mainly an attempt to minimize some of the negative effects of Musk’s efforts.
“It seems to be a strange place to start saying, hey, we are going to have the greatest economy in world history, but we will have to measure it differently because you cannot see it,” said Doug Holtz-Eakin, president of the American Action Forum, in a Doug Holtz-Eakin, President of the American Action Forum, in a The recent episode of Yahoo Finance Podcast Capitol Gains.
“It’s not a great sale work,” he added.
The thrust is also curious because, on the whole, despite the general concerns about public runoff expenses, the part of the Government of the Government of America has in fact decreased, because the increases in the private sector have exceeded the growth of the government.
The quarterly GDP and the Vapi are both gathered and released by the US Office for Economic Analysis (BEA), an agency in the Commercial Department. Reading GDP for the first quarter of 2025 – the first release that will include Trump time in power – is due next month.
Concerns about a slowdown in GDP were also increasing after the Trump presidency saw a variety of actions – prices in Doge to a repression of immigration – which could provide drag on economic production.
JPMorgan Chase recently revised its GDP prediction in the first quarter of 1.5% to 1% in part due to trade tensions. Goldman Sachs also reduces its projection of GDP, which reduces its growth forecasts at the end of 2025 to 1.7% against 2.2% before.
Musk’s push to the idea is based on its often harvest point that public spending can push “artificially high” GDP without helping the economy.
But this comes as a reduction in the workforce led by federal agencies muscles begins to feel in government data The employment of the federal government fell by 10,000 in February.
Other dismissals of federal workers and a brutal threshold for public spending could have an impact on the economy in various negative ways.
Trump added to the commentary focused on the private sector when he spoke to journalists from the oval on Friday following the recent reports and said that government jobs are “not the jobs you want”.
“We are trying to reduce the government and develop the private sector,” he added.
Commerce secretary Howard Lunick supervises the BEA and recently promised to separate the data, but he also seemed to go further and said that he wanted certain government data to be counted and other excluded.
“It happens like that,” he told Fox News, “if the government buys a reservoir, it is GDP, but paying 1,000 people to think about buying a reservoir is not a GDP. It’s waste.”
Other Trump officials, such as the Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent this week this week, have praised a global Trump administration effort to “reprimand the economy” but without weighing on the data in one way or another.
BEA officials did not answer Yahoo Finance questions about exactly what Lutnick meant and how such a partial measure could be calculated, but the comments were widely rated in economic circles.
President Donald Trump speaks to journalists while preparing to leave the White House on February 28 (Saul Loeb / AFP via Getty Images) ·Saul Loeb via getty images
Trump’s long and heavy relationships with economic data is also a factor. Trump Aides had frequent discussions in his first mandate on the calculation of the annual GDP growth, examining the measure of potentially more flattering change between the fourth quarter of a year and the fourth quarter of the following year.
At other times, Trump went further and simply called economic data, he did not like false. The press secretary, Sean Spicer, said somewhat sadly famous in 2017, shortly after Trump’s first victory, that job figures “could have been false in the past, but it’s very real now”.
Left economic observers have also been frank in their criticism in recent days. Lindsay Owens, director of The Groundwork Collaborative, told Yahoo Finance this week that this idea was revealing of “the phase of the Trump administration where they are starting to cook books”, stressing Trump’s story with economic data and saying that the underlying concern in his mind is a Trump administration “worrying about the risk of recession”.
Many Yahoo Finance economists have spoken this week has also stressed that it is quite very good for different administrations to highlight various economic data slices – an example of Biden years was a heavy objective of his employees on the black unemployment rate – If this is the path that Trump chooses.
“If you want to assert the case to measure things differently, of course, it makes sense,” noted Holtz-Eakin, “but I see no reason to withdraw anything or not to collect data that we are collecting. It is a precious thing that the BEA does and should not be tinkered.”
Ben Werschkul is Washington correspondent for Yahoo Finance.
Every Friday, Yahoo FinanceRick Newman And Ben Werschkul You bring a unique overview of how the American policy and government affect your net profit on the Capitol gains. Watch or listen to Capitol gains on Apple podcasts,, SpotifyOr wherever you find your favorite podcasts.
