One of the first casualties of the federal government shutdown was a much-anticipated jobs report that should have been released on October 3. There were numerous news stories conveying the message that the report would not be released, and several since then have pieced together various sources of private sector data to fill in the picture of the current labor market.

But some have pointed out that it’s very likely that the jobs report was finishedbefore the shutdown started, making the decision not to make it public a political one, not some inevitable consequence of the shutdown.

Bureau of Labor Statistics jobs data has been a source of ongoing concern for the Trump White House. The president fired the BLS commissioner Erika McEntarfer, claiming that the data had been rigged to make him look bad. Trump picked an unqualified successor, E.J. Antoni, and then withdrew the job offer. The September report was very likely to show more bad news for the labor market.

Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts) has been one of the few voices raising this issue. She sent a letter to Trump Office of Management and Budget (OMB) director Russ Vought and William Wiatrowski, the acting commissioner of the BLS, which was shared with CNN: “While the data has been processed and there was time to prepare for the data’s release in the event of a government shutdown, the Administration is choosing not to release Friday’s jobs report,”

It’s worth noting that during the longest shutdown in the nation’s history – under the first Trump term, and lasting from December 22, 2018 until January 25, 2019 – the jobs report was released on January 4 during that span, thanks to an appropriations deal that kept some agencies operating. The New York Times calledit a “blockbuster” and “one of the strongest months of job gains in the last decade.”

In any event, the Trump administration could most certainly do more to release this data if it wanted to do so. In fact, the Wall Street Journal reported on October 9 that furloughed workers at the BLS would return to complete the September inflation report, which is scheduled to be released later this month. That decision – to release price data that is important to financial markets, but not the jobs data that informs our understanding of how workers are faring– only bolsters the case that the decision to hold up the jobs report is a political one.

This first appeared on CERP.

The post The Case of the Disappearing Jobs Report appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

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