WH claims 'inflation tamed,' per DoorDash stats. Company says that's not in its report.

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The White House posted a blog on its website earlier this week announcing “NEW DATA: Lower Prices, Bigger Paychecks.” The announcement was based entirely on a report from food delivery app DoorDash titled “State of Local Commerce,” and the White House drew some pretty stunning conclusions. “...inflation has been tamed, everyday prices are beginning to drop, and wages are growing,” the post states. Sounds great! But is that what the report actually says? And what does it say about this government that they’re relying on a private company’s data in lieu of actual statistics of its own?

For context, the DoorDash report focuses on three main indicators; the Cheeseburger Index, which measures the average cost of a cheeseburger, soda, and fries; the Breakfast Basics Index, measuring the cost of three eggs, a glass of milk, a bagel, and an avocado; and Everyday Essentials, accounting for the cost of basic household items like toothpaste, diapers and laundry detergent. The White House post cites the Breakfast Basics and Everyday Essentials numbers reported by DoorDash as evidence that Trump has “tamed inflation.”

I reached out to DoorDash on Wednesday to better understand the actual meaning of the report and whether the company agrees with the White House’s interpretation, and I connected with a spokesperson by phone. 

“I guess to zoom out a little bit, this report is not about politics, it's about data, right?” the spokesperson said. “We wanted to give people timely and transparent insights to better understand what's happening in their communities…We're really just putting out meaningful trends and not offering up an interpretation of what those trends say one way or the other vis a vis the White House.”

I asked the DoorDash spokesperson if the company would agree with this characterization that inflation has been tamed. He said “that's not something that we wrote in the report.” 

There is, of course, such a thing as subtext. So I pressed further, asking if the company feels a responsibility to clarify what this report does say and if “inflation has been tamed” is a conclusion one should take from this report? “The White House can use the language that they are using on that. I'm not gonna speculate on that,” the spokesperson said. “But, you know, we put everything that we feel is relevant in the report.”

It’s notable that DoorDash seems reluctant to wade into politics when the company made the single-largest donation to an Andrew Cuomo Super PAC during his Democratic mayoral primary bid this past spring. Despite donating to Democrats in the past, DoorDash CEO Tony Xu was a vocal supporter of Trump’s budget this past summer. But when it comes to criticizing the White House at this moment, they don’t want to go there.

The White House’s celebration of the DoorDash report comes at an interesting time. On Wednesday they announced that the October labor statistics report would be missing key data—such as inflation—and that the October jobs report may not be released at all.

“The Democrats [Editor’s note: Citations needed] may have permanently damaged the federal statistical system, with October CPI and jobs reports likely never being released, and all of that economic data released will be permanently impaired, leaving our policymakers at the Fed flying blind at a critical period,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said on Wednesday. 

The absence of data is due to the fact that the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), which compiles the relevant data and generates the economic reports, was mostly inactive during the government shutdown. The bureau has also fallen prey to Trump’s capricious hiring and firing, with his Heritage Foundation nominee to head the agency withdrawn in late September for unknown reasons. If you look at the BLS senior staff page, you’ll find many top positions listed as vacant. 

As someone who is most certainly not an economist, I thought it would be prudent to speak to someone who is. So I reached out to Daniel S. Hamermesh, emeritus professor of economics at Royal Holloway University of London and the University of Texas at Austin (plus a litany of other impressive superlatives.) 

When we spoke by phone Thursday, Hamermesh told me receiving my email about this story “was the humorous moment of my day.” He explained of the White House relying on the DoorDash report for meaningful data is “so absurd. If anybody would believe this says anything about the average person, it's just nuts.”

Hamermesh explained that the DoorDash report is “hardly representative of what the average person buys each month,” and was flabbergasted that the White House would extrapolate larger meaning from it. “I'm quite sure as long as we don't have the national information, these guys will cherry-pick information that makes them look good,” Hamermesh said. “And there's always something that makes you look good—even in a recession.”

Hamermesh said the real question is when the actual BLS data will come out. The September jobs report still hasn’t been released despite being gathered before the shutdown, and there’s no October data to speak of because the collection process didn’t take place. According to Hamermesh, it’s still possible to collect for November, but with the government just reopening today, it’s hard to say if that will happen. He pointed out that withholding reliable data is a tool dictatorships use to keep people in the dark.

“Until we have real data, people making policy haven't got a clue what to rely on,” Hamermesh told me. “They grasp at straws.” Though, he added, “This is one of the most outlandish straws that one could grasp at.”