Another Casualty of Senate Democrats: Shutdown Halts U.S. Jobs Report

In yet another exhibit of the harms of the intransigence of Senate Democrats, Americans didn’t receive our U.S. monthly jobs report on Friday due to the shutdown that began last Wednesday and could stretch on indefinitely.

The report is delayed because government workers are unable to complete their work as many federal employees are furloughed. The last time a U.S. Labor Department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) jobs report was delayed by a government shutdown was in 2013.

Without the official figures, Rachel Barber from USA Today gave some alternative economic metrics:

There are other releases economists have their eyes on, like the ADP’s National Employment Report, which published Oct. 1 and found private employers shed 32,000 jobs during September … some private sources economists examine include freight data from ports and railroads, industry group data from organizations like the National Association of Realtors, and earnings reports from public companies. 

 

Homebase’s September Main Street Health Report on small business labor trends, found workforce participation fell 3.6% and hours worked declined 4.7%, closely mirroring late-summer declines in 2023. While the report focuses on small businesses that primarily employ hourly workers, Homebase CEO John Waldmann said it can offer early signals about broader economic conditions.

But even if we did get the jobs numbers, unfortunately, the BLS has recently been notoriously and wildly inaccurate, with major revisions to the numbers months or even years afterwards. Last month, we learned that 911,000 fewer jobs were created in 2024 than the BLS previously found. In 2023, job growth was revised down by 818,000.

Accurate employment data is essential for policymakers from the Federal Reserve to the President in setting national policies that affect every American. 

President Trump and his allies have called for major reforms in how the federal government collects jobs data, since so many firms now are not participating in government surveys with the same reliability as in the past.

Our friends at Committee to Unleash Prosperity recently posted:

We need accurate and reliable jobs estimates from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and we aren’t getting them.  One of the surveys, the survey of firms, found 22,000 net new jobs in August. The other survey, of households, estimates 288,000 jobs.  One is bullish; one is bearish.

 

Which is right?

Then there are the jobs revisions report today. They now total nearly 500,000 downward revisions from original headline numbers.

 

The same problems at the BLS that started three years ago still haven’t been fixed and are arguably getting worse. And in four days we’re going to get the annual benchmark which is estimated to be another downward revision of over half a million jobs.

 

The Senate needs to immediately confirm EJ Antoni to fix this agency and give us accurate numbers.

Unfortunately, Antoni’s nomination to fix the BLS got torpedoed by his foes, determined to keep the broken status quo. Here’s hoping that our government shutdown could be the reset button our federal leaders can take to restore trust in our economic process.