As the commerce secretary, Howard Lutnick, pushes for cutting government spending from GDP calculations, alarms have been raised for the Ford School's Betsey Stevenson. Stevenson told Planet Money in a discussion about the GDP and government work that "There's no merit to that argument, because you can actually look at GDP without the government sector in it. So it's not skewing our data. It's trickier when there's not market forces, but I think it's kind of silly and arbitrary to say, when the government does something, we shouldn't put it in and count it as having any value."
