Both economics and statistics are important fields to have expertise in, when it comes to fashioning public policy and administration.
This. My area of study has far more to do with the latter (statistics) and I am far less familiar with the former apart from intro macro/micro courses, but I definitely view it as an FF discipline. While economics will never have the precision of the natural sciences, we need to have a basic framework of assumptions and a toolbox of methods in order to gauge the impact of different policies.