People do nothing because they believe others are doing nothing and it's a suppressive feedback loop that's exploited. Repeating that people know and do nothing reinforces it and falls into the broad category of criticism for the the sake of social flagging and not towards actual growth.
It’s impossible for me to think of what purpose taking this deliberate misinformation effort to this extent can have.
I can only consider that this is a purposeful attack on the American people and government credibility from the top. And if so, how could someone be so influenced to follow it through? Is it just a personal hatred of Americans justifying harm to them?
These numbers have paper trails which would require large conspiracy among civil servants who have really no reason to care about fudging numbers... and if they had this conspiracy operating why would they reveal this at all? It would require an oversight investigation of some sort beforehand.
Besides (not) being told "this is how we're counting", there are incentives that align with functional overstatement.
A weak example is keeping people on payroll who may not have active contracts. There's no reason to purge them if they're eligible to resume working (within the allowed period, which may be, say, 12-18 months), but it's not strictly fair to count them as being employed in the same way as a traditional 12 month FT hire.
Last year, we purged over a thousand people from payroll who hadn't officially separated. Unusual, but not abnormal. Who would call that a conspiracy?
I think it's convenient to lie in aggregate, especially when "job creation" and high payroll counts loosely correspond to economic growth and if not eligible voters, then at least tax revenues.
I know that the status quo in science journalism is to desperately find ways to excite people about research but this headline boils down to “scientists use computer to help with research” and the actual story is “company discovers new magnet”.
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