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Key US Eco Data in Jeopardy Amid Shutdown
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October 14, 2025
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October 14, 2025
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4:15Now PlayingNicole Bachaud, Labor Economist at ZipRecruiter, joins to discuss the impact of the US government shutdown on the broader labor market.
The US government shutdown threatens to erode the quality of one of the nation’s most important inflation statistics — if there even is a report at all.
Policymakers, economists and investors are already worried about how October’s consumer price index, due for release next month, will be affected by the government shutdown. While the Bureau of Labor Statistics was directed to recall some staff to prepare the September CPI in a rare exception, the agency hasn’t been able to collect any new price information since the Oct. 1 closure.
“Starting now, accuracy is getting worse,” Omair Sharif, president of Inflation Insights LLC, said in an Oct. 9 interview, just over a week into the shutdown. “By the third week, you’re looking at very bad quality — or no data at all.”
Of all the government data that isn’t produced in a lapse of funding, the CPI stands out because of the labor-intensive nature of collecting prices. The BLS gathers information about roughly 80,000 items across the country, mostly done in-person through three 10-day periods throughout the month.
That was already a challenge with staffing cuts in the Trump administration — due to resource constraints, the agency has suspended parts of the CPI sample in recent months and consequently leaned more on a particular kind of imputation to fill in the blanks.
“They cannot go back to the past, so they will impute more,” said Erica Groshen, who served as BLS commissioner during the 2013 government shutdown. The staff will also probably have to work faster, or possibly put in overtime due to the compressed timeline, she said.
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