Donald Trump’s administration has said it is unlikely that October’s Consumer Price Index and jobs report will be released, blaming the record 43-day government shutdown for preventing data collectors from being able to work.
“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,” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said Wednesday.
Economists had feared the reports, key measures of inflation and therefore the broader health of the U.S. economy, might be unavailable given the deadlock in federal funding negotiations on Capitol Hill, which resulted in public services running at a bare minimum for six weeks.
The White House has since clarified that September’s jobs report will be released soon, as its data was collected prior to the shutdown taking effect on October 1, but that its October counterpart may not be released.
The Independent has reached out to the White House, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and the Department of Labor for comment.
As it stands, the most recent jobs report made available by the Trump administration is August’s, which was published on September 5.
That did not make pleasant reading for the president, as it revealed that the U.S. economy added just 22,000 jobs in the eighth month of the year and that unemployment had climbed to a four-year high of 4.3 percent.
It was also notable as the first government assessment of the labor market to be published after Trump’s controversial firing of BLS commissioner Erika McEntarfer, whom he had accused of issuing “phony” numbers in her July report, which said the economy had added just 73,000 jobs that month – actually a better outcome than August’s.
The first report to emerge after the last major shutdown – which took place in Trump’s first term from late December 2018 to January 2019 and, at 35 days, was, until very recently, the longest in American history – also brought bleak news.
Hiring tumbled in February 2019, with a slight dip in the unemployment rate and the economy adding just 20,000 jobs.
While the absence of the October 2025 numbers might spare the president further unwelcome headlines in the short term, assuming the summer slump has continued, it creates problems for the Federal Reserve, which uses the figures to inform its decisions on monetary policy.
However, the Fed could allow itself to be guided by figures from private businesses, such as ADP, instead, which found that the U.S. added 42,000 jobs in October, an improvement over August’s numbers but still well short of the total that so incensed Trump that he fired McEntarfer.
Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell downplayed the significance of the absence of official data as “a temporary state of affairs” in late October, adding: “If you ask me, ‘Could it affect the December meeting?’ I’m not saying it’s going to, but… what do you do if you’re driving in the fog? You slow down.”
