Requiem for a Jobs Report

This morning the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) would have published the October jobs report if the government had not shut down. Instead, we are in the dark, or at least thick fog. For five weeks we have relied on a subset of data, mostly from the private sector, to track the economy. Fed Chair Powell spoke for policymakers and businesses when he said “What do you do if you’re driving in the fog? You slow down.”

As I’ve written for the Peterson Institute for International Economics (PIIE), private-sector data are a useful complement to official statistics, but not a substitute — and without official statistics, private-sector data degrade over time. The shutdown has been a dry run of what economic data might look like if official statistics get worse from underfunding, attrition of technical experts, failure to modernize, or politicized manipulation. No one should feel encouraged.

While the private sector has stepped up during the shutdown, it can patch some gaps in official statistics but not others. Summarizing another post I wrote at PIIE: the private sector provides reasonable signals for nonfarm payrolls, job openings, consumer retail spending, goods prices, and housing costs. But the fog remains especially dense for critical economic measures like unemployment and services inflation. And forget about GDP, a broad measure that combines components from many sources, using internationally accepted accounting standards: no company has the breadth of data, unbiased credibility, and coordinating power to estimate GDP from private-sector data.

When the shutdown ends, the fog will dissipate slowly. On the jobs side, we should get September data quickly-ish since BLS was ready to publish just before the shutdown started. October jobs data for households are probably lost forever since households weren’t surveyed in October and retrospective responses might not be accurate enough to publish. October jobs data for payrolls might still be published since firms have records of their payrolls and can answer retrospective questions more easily than households can. November jobs data depend on whether BLS will be able to survey households and firms later this month. It will take time to catch up, and there will be permanent holes in data series.

Furthermore, these holes in our data series will have downstream effects, though they’ll be hard to predict. The statistics supply chain is complicated: data products from one statistical agency often serve as inputs into other agencies’ products. Census Bureau annual population estimates, for instance, are essential for scaling the household survey of the jobs report and for calculating per capita measures of income, spending, GDP, and other Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) measures. It’s possible that the Census population estimates for 2026, due out next month, will be so delayed that BLS and BEA won’t have those essential inputs for their early 2026 reports.1 And many statistical models rely on continuous historical data series: too many months of missing data could break seasonal adjustment tools, the birth-death model, and other essential data infrastructure.