Trump administration disbands two expert panels on economic data

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. President Donald Trump's administration has disbanded two expert committees that worked with the government to produce economic statistics, potentially affecting the quality of data.

The terminations by Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick were effective February 28 and communicated on Tuesday via email to one of the panels, the Federal Economic Statistics Advisory Committee (FESAC), which assisted with inflation and employment gross domestic product (GDP) data.

The email read in part "the Secretary of Commerce has determined that the purposes for which FESAC was established has been fulfilled and the committee has been terminated, effective February 28 2025." The second group - the Bureau of Economic Analysis Advisory Committee, which consulted on a separate group of economic data - was also terminated.

"This will impact the quality of data because it's a core principle of federal statistical agencies that they continually improve and innovate," Erica Groshen, a former FESAC member, told Reuters. "Without a robust flow of information and advice between experts outside their agencies, it's going to be harder for them to do that."

The Commerce Department and the White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment Tuesday evening.

Groshen, who is also a former Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) commissioner, said FESAC was made up of academics, private-sector economists and data scientists, and focused on continually improving economic data produced by the BLS as well as the Commerce Department's statistical agencies, the Census Bureau and Bureau of Economic Analysis.

The committees had been in place for at least two decades.

The disbanding comes days after Lutnick said he would strip government spending from the GDP report, a move some economists said was impossible and intended to obscure the economic impact of deep spending cuts and mass layoffs being pursued by tech billionaire Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE.

"When you go down that rabbit hole, it's like trying to unscramble the eggs," said Brian Bethune, an Economics professor at Boston College. "For example, a lot of the defense spending goes to private contractors. So how can you cut that out of GDP? It's a ridiculous idea."

(Reporting by Lucia Mutikani in Washington and Ismail Shakil in Ottawa. Editing by Gerry Doyle)