After World War I the United States, like every post-industrial western nation, created institutions to manage its government -- in the USA that was the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), for example, and the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA), which provides comprehensive economic data. Also the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), which provides data on the working population, businesses, and employment.

Modern nations created these types of offices because individually the nations were getting LARGE. And complex and geographically distributed. Elected leaders of widely different political stripes agreed that in order to even debate each other, in order to create legislation -- even if that creation was contentious -- they needed to agree on what the facts were

So these independent institution were created, and their independence was a foundational part of their mandate. No decisions, whatever their ideological basis, could be made without facts and those facts needed to be undisputed. So both American political parties made sure qualified, educated people staffed those agencies, left those agencies alone, and accepted their reports as accurate whether they liked them or not.

Until today. Today Trump adopted the Soviet model of economic reporting, which is to say fictional. Trump got a report he didn't like and fired a career economist, a lifetime federal employee, because he didn't like the jobs report. He offered no facts, no proof of her doing anything wrong -- he just fired her.        

This seemingly bureaucratic thing is arguably the most destructive thing he's done because now we can no longer rely on public information. Rather than risk their careers, their homes and livelihood, people will produce whatever report is required of them.

You think I exaggerate? This thing -- this exact thing -- is what brought down the Soviet Union in a matter of weeks. If you can't trust your institutions, you are not a nation. You are a population under authoritarian rule.