Key Takeaways
- The Bureau of Labor Statistics missed a second month of jobs reports Friday, deepening a data blackout that’s left policymakers in the dark about important economic trends.
- The longer the shutdown continues, the greater the chance the reports will be skipped entirely rather than just delayed.
How many jobs did the U.S. economy gain or add in October? We may never know.
In a normal month, the Bureau of Labor Statistics would publish its monthly jobs report Friday, with information on the national unemployment rate, job creation, and other data about the labor market. But due to the ongoing government shutdown, the longest in history, that report won’t come out. What’s more, the bureau never carried out the surveys in October that the report is based on, raising the possibility that the data will not just be delayed, but will never come at all.
What This Means For The Economy
The lack of data about inflation and employment leaves policymakers, business leaders, and investors in the dark about important economic trends, raising the chances that important shifts in conditions go unnoticed.
The lack of job market data is especially vexing for anyone who relies on such information for making decisions about investments, business, or public policy. The job market has shown signs of deterioration in recent months as uncertainty about tariffs, the adoption of AI, and other headwinds have discouraged companies from hiring. In the absence of government reports, alternate sources of data have started waving red flags about a possible rise in unemployment.
Economists do expect the BLS to release its jobs report for September shortly after the government re-opens, since the agency had already collected the data used to make that report. But October is up in the air. No one is sure how the bureau and other statistical agencies will respond to the shutdown, which has kept them closed for an unprecedented amount of time.
There are at least three major ways the BLS could address its data collection gap, Ronnie Walker, an economist at Goldman Sachs, said in a commentary last month.
First, it could ask survey respondents to retrospectively answer questions about their situation the week of October 12, when the surveys would have asked about had they been distributed. It could send out surveys belatedly and shift the “reference week” to a later date in October. Or it could skip collecting data for October entirely, leaving a big blank space in the charts.
“The longer the shutdown lasts, the greater the risk that the BLS forgoes collecting October data,” Walker wrote.
The jobs report is hardly the only piece of economic data being delayed. The economic calendar is now missing reports on inflation, housing construction, and a list of other subjects that get longer by the day.
