The October jobs and consumer price index reports may never come out even after the government reopens, the White House said Wednesday while pointing the finger at Democrats.
Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said policymakers at the Federal Reserve are left “flying blind” after the shutdown forced the Bureau of Labor Statistics to go dark, halting data collection and the release of key reports.
“The Democrats may have permanently damaged the Federal Statistical system, with October CPI and jobs reports likely never being released, and all of that economic data released will be permanently impaired, leaving our policymakers at the Fed flying blind at a critical period,” she told reporters.
The latest jobs report was due last week, but did not come out for the second month in a row as the longest shutdown in U.S. history continues to drag on. The BLS reports, which guide the Fed’s monetary policy decision-making, became the center of a firestorm in August after President Donald Trump fired the agency’s chief because he was unhappy with the numbers.
Goldman Sachs estimated that the U.S. likely lost 50,000 jobs in October, while economists surveyed by Dow Jones pegged the figure higher at 60,000. In the private sector, employers added 42,000 last month, according to payroll processing firm ADP.
Mohamed El-Erian, chief economic adviser for Allianz, warned that the failure to release the October CPI and jobs reports is “virtually guaranteed to fuel conspiracy theories.”
“The government shutdown derailed that data collection process,” he wrote on X. “Trying to ‘catch up’ on data collection is not just technically tricky; it may also be relatively inaccurate.”
Some economists have urged the Labor Department to focus on gathering data for the November reports instead.
“From a monetary policy perspective, you want the November data first,” Brian Bethune, an economics professor at Boston College, told Reuters. “You don’t want to have November data in January. You want the November data first, and then you backfill from that point.”
Fed Chairman Jerome Powell earlier described the data blackout as “a temporary state of affairs” amid concerns about the shutdown’s possible impact on the central bank’s next meeting, which is scheduled for December.
“We’re going to do our jobs, we’re going to collect every scrap of data we can find, evaluate it, and think carefully about it,” he told reporters last month. “If you ask me, ‘Could it affect the December meeting?’ I’m not saying it’s going to, but yeah, you could imagine that. What do you do if you’re driving in the fog? You slow down.”
The BLS and Labor Department did not immediately return a request for comment.
