- A major federal agency is increasingly the publication of less accurate inflation data Partially thanks for freezing the employment of the Trump administration in January. The Labor Statistics Office, which is part of the Ministry of Labor, is increasingly dependent on data collection methods that are less accurate than usual and have stopped tracking inflation numbers in three American cities.
Contracts of low quality and accuracy in federal statistics, which were exacerbated by President Donald Trump’s discounts, have economists who are wondering about data that teach everything from federal reserve decisions to social security payments for more than 70 million Americans.
Since he took office in January, Trump The efforts remained To reduce the budgets and employees of government agencies.
The work statistics office, which collects data related to employment and inflation and other areas, faced an freezing of the Trump administration in January, and an unclear reduction in employees. In addition, the proposed Trump budget 2026 will reduce the financing and employees of the BLS by another 8 %, Bloomberg I mentioned.
The recruitment freezing has already been forced into the agency, creating a consumer price index that measures inflation, to reduce the number of companies in which they are achieved from prices, Wall Street Journal I stated, quoting his unveiled officials. In the inflation report last month, which followed April prices, workers said workers It no longer collects numbers For three cities: Lincoln, Nip. Proveau, Utah; Bvalo, New York also said that it increases increasingly dependent on the methods of collecting less accurate data, or “proving the different cell” of the report.
The BLS collects data that informs the inflation report through field operators who claim infection, who go to brick and mortars to collect data on products and services. If the meters cannot find a specific product in a specific city, they record the price of a product similar to the best of the next. The presence of fewer workers in this field means that BLS must rely more than usual for its following estimates.
Bls wrote in “BLS discounts when current resources no longer support assembly efforts. BLS will continue to evaluate surveying operations.” statement Earlier this month.
The Ministry of Labor, the BLS Mother’s Agency, did not respond to the comment.
Erika Groshin, a former Commissioner of BLS and a senior economist at Cornell College of Industrial and Workers Industries, said the latest Trump discounts add to BLS contracts struggling to publish accurate and detailed data despite the budget and political pressure discounts. She said that the agency’s budget has decreased by 20 % by real number since 2009.
“You have an institution that was already struggling a little, then you have this side damage over it,” said Grochen luck.
While the agency always seeks to maintain exact upper lines numbers, such as the general consumer price index, the scope of more granular data can be greatly expanded, at the expense of those who rely on it. She said that the inflation and employment data published by BLS affect everything from social security payments to work decisions to the availability of unemployment insurance benefits.
“The advantages of social security are indexed to the current consumer price index,” said Grochen luck. “If BLS makes a mistake at the tenth point at a point in the consumer price index, then two billion dollars in social security or payment will be paid.”
The repercussions of the less accurate data can be significantly increasing for the Federal Reserve, and the chief economist in wealth management in UBS Paul Dunovan in A. Note. Although the central bank prefers to rely on the personal consumption expenditures index, it also monitors the consumer price index and some of the BLS employment numbers.
“The lower understanding of inflation in the United States increases the chances of making an error in politics (especially with the” adopting data “).
In general, Groshen said that BLS will likely continue to reduce its operations in order to maintain the quality of the title numbers such as the consumer price index, however this comes at a cost. Some statistics as well as useful programs may be sacrificed to understand the causes and the consequences of changes.
She said: “This is an option that we do as a country to transfer a blind, or to fly blindly,” she said. “We can have a clearer windshield, but we allow it to be covered.”
This story was originally shown on Fortune.com
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