WASHINGTON – Just hours after the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) released a disappointing jobs report, President Trump announced he was firing the agency’s chief. The decision is part of a broader pattern of the administration manipulating economic data.
Last month, Senator Ruben Gallego (D-AZ) led colleagues in demanding answers after the BLS announced it would scale back Consumer Price Index (CPI) data collection.
Yesterday, the Bureau responded with vague reassurances that failed to answer the questions raised in the Senators’ letter.
The Wall Street Journal: Labor Department Skirts Senators’ Questions on Inflation Data
[Matt Grossman, 8/1/25]
A group of Democratic senators pressed the Labor Department in June over concerns about missing data in the survey behind the government’s official inflation statistics. On Thursday, a Labor official wrote back without answering most of their questions.
The Labor Department said in a letter seen by The Wall Street Journal that the government is “committed to providing accurate, timely, and impartial economic statistics,” but it didn’t respond in the letter to specific questions that the senators had posed. A Labor Department representative declined to comment.
The senators, led by Ruben Gallego of Arizona, had asked for information about the scale of a staffing shortfall at the Bureau of Labor Statistics and for an analysis of how lagging data collection would hurt statistical accuracy, and inquired as to whether staffing problems would also disrupt other government data, among other specific questions.
The BLS said in a public posting this week that it has stopped collecting price data in three cities entirely—Lincoln, Neb.; Provo, Utah; and Buffalo, N.Y. —and that it is missing an average of 15% of data in other parts of the country where it tracks prices. BLS staffers have blamed a staffing shortfall caused by a federal hiring freeze.
By contrast, during the Covid-19 pandemic, when the rapid shutdown of the consumer economy also caused data-collection challenges, the BLS was missing at most around 5% of the price data it seeks, according to a report from a BLS economist.
Businesses, investors and officials at the Federal Reserve all rely on the BLS’s inflation figures to track price trends and, in the Fed’s case, to set interest rates. “We’re monitoring the situation,” Fed Chair Jerome Powell said this week when asked about the data challenges.
In its posting this week, the BLS cited an internal analysis showing that recent data shortfalls likely aren’t skewing headline inflation figures. Omair Sharif, head of independent analysis firm Inflation Insights, criticized the BLS analysis and said it was insufficient for determining the gravity of the problem.
A representative for Gallego said his office is exploring legislative options.
8/1/25