WATCHING THE WONKS: The Bureau of Labor Statistics is facing an unusual level of scrutiny of late, due to some recent slip-ups and an unexpectedly large downward revision to the jobs numbers for the 12 months ending in March. Congressional Republicans have seized on the softer-than-previously-known labor market, while House Education and the Workforce Chair Virginia Foxx and a group of GOP senators have sent letters calling on BLS to explain itself. At times, these critiques have veered conspiratorial — particularly from former President Donald Trump and excitable corners of Wall Street — a notion that BLS experts flatly reject. “People who are running around saying ‘this is some sort of political move by BLS,’ it is inconceivable,” William Beach, a senior fellow at the Economic Policy Innovation Center and BLS commissioner from 2019-2023. “It would be hard enough to do that with a group of 30 people, but thousands of people are working on this.” Another former BLS chief, Erica Groshen, concurred with that assessment while noting that these gauges are trickiest when the economy is shifting. “There is a tendency for revisions to be not as symmetrical around inflection points in the business cycle,” said Groshen, who served during former President Barack Obama’s second term. Conservative skepticism of the validity of jobs numbers dates back at least to the recovery from the Great Recession, leading to some linguistic contortions when those same reports favored Trump. Beach cited the uptick in immigration and a post-Covid change in employer survey response behavior as additional challenges for BLS’ monthly measurements. More employers reporting outside the initial response window creates the possibility of bigger swings when they do complete their submissions. According to BLS, the average response rate in 2020 was 73.5% at the first release of data. By 2023, it was down to 64.5%. Still, BLS’ reputation has been dented somewhat by the premature release of inflation data in May, and inadvertently giving several international firms August’s figures before they were publicly available, among other self-inflicted incidents. The New York Times has more on that here. A Labor Department spokesperson said those errors were due to technical issues and process breakdowns that it has addressed and referred the incidents to the agency’s inspector general for further review. The Federal Reserve is all but guaranteed to cut interest rates at its upcoming meeting, due to BLS’ data and other indicators, and it is possible it may have acted sooner had the initial jobs numbers been closer to the mark, though they know better than to take them as gospel. “The Fed is not dumb; they have some of the smartest labor economists in the world, and they are very aware of this risk and uncertainty,” said Ernie Tedeschi of the Yale Budget Lab. GOOD MORNING. It’s Monday, Sept. 9. Welcome back to Morning Shift, your go-to tipsheet on labor and employment-related immigration. Send feedback, tips and exclusives to nniedzwiadek@politico.com and lukenye@politico.com. Follow us on X at @NickNiedz and @Lawrence_Ukenye.
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