The Shutdown Is Sparing Trump Some Bad Economic News

But what if you could keep the government shut down long enough to prevent BLS from collecting the data it will need to report the consumer price index on October 14? Then the Fed would have less information than otherwise to judge whether inflation is too high! The Fed’s preferred inflation metric is the Commerce Department’s personal consumption index, or PCI, not the CPI, but the PCI depends on BLS data, and anyway the next PCI release won’t come out until after the Fed makes its decision. A delay in the CPI might also mean Social Security recipients will receive a lower cost-of-living adjustment, which I presume Trump would judge a plus.

The government shutdown, then, turns out to be heaven for Trump: Although we know the economy is faltering, we don’t know how much it’s faltering because we don’t have the data. As Liza Featherstone noted Monday, Trump is waging war against data. No jobs numbers are better than bad jobs numbers.

This last point hasn’t escaped notice from Senator Elizabeth Warren. On Thursday, she wrote Russell Vought, the OMB director and Project 2025 architect, to demand that the jobs number not be held hostage to the government shutdown. “According to experts,” Warren observed, “the data for Friday’s report is likely ready for public release.” Indeed, as former BLS Commissioner Bill Beach said in an interview this week, “The jobs report is likely written in final draft and could be released on Friday, should the agency reopen.” If it’s written in final draft, why wait? “The administration is choosing not to release Friday’s jobs report,” Warren concluded.