It has been a rough year for the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
The agency — which produces key numbers on inflation, unemployment and other aspects of the economy — has made a series of missteps in recent months, including a premature release of the Consumer Price Index.
That has prompted questions about how the bureau, which is part of the Labor Department, shares information and whether it has been giving an unfair advantage to Wall Street insiders who can profit from it. The agency’s inspector general is looking into the incidents. So is at least one congressional committee.
At the same time, the bureau — like other statistical agencies in the United States and around the world — is facing long-running challenges: shrinking budgets, declining response rates to its surveys, shifting economic patterns in the wake of the pandemic and increased public skepticism of its numbers, at times stoked by political leaders including former President Donald J. Trump.
Economists and other experts say the bureau’s data remains reliable, and they praise the agency’s efforts to ensure its numbers are accurate and free of political bias. But they say the recent problems threaten to undermine confidence in the agency, and in government statistics more broadly.
“A statistical agency lives or dies by trust,” said Erica Groshen, who served as commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics during the Obama administration. Once that trust is lost, she added, “it’s very hard to restore it.”
The agency recognizes that threat, its current leader says, and is taking it seriously.
“We are under more scrutiny because the environment around the agency has changed,” Erika McEntarfer, the commissioner of the bureau, said in an interview.
But there are major unanswered questions about the incidents, including who obtained the price data early and why the bureau hasn’t been quicker to adjust to the sensitivity of its interactions with Wall Street. And records obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests suggest that some explanations provided by the bureau were incomplete or inaccurate.
A String of Mistakes
The bureau’s recent troubles began in February when an employee sent an email to a group of Wall Street analysts he termed “super users.” The email, which discussed the methods used to calculate housing costs in the Consumer Price Index, set off a furor on Wall Street, where access to even seemingly small bits of information can give investors a trading edge. Analysts who didn’t receive the email bombarded the bureau with requests to get on the “super users list.”
Then in May, the bureau accidentally published data on the Consumer Price Index roughly half an hour before its scheduled release. The data was posted to a part of the bureau website that is used by sophisticated analysts, who download the agency’s data automatically. That meant that many investors, in effect, had access to the data before the general public.
The early release got less attention than the “super users” incident, but it was in some ways more significant: The price index is considered a “principal federal economic indicator,” a designation that is meant to carry additional protections to ensure the numbers aren’t shared prematurely.
In the most recent incident, a technical glitch last month delayed by more than half an hour the release of a closely watched report containing annual revisions to employment figures. During the delay, banks including Goldman Sachs and Nomura, as well as Wall Street research firms, called the bureau and were given the numbers directly, while others were left waiting.
“At first, I was more than a little annoyed,” said Troy Ludtka, an economist at SMBC Nikko Securities, explaining that he called three times for the data and didn’t get through. “The statistical agencies can’t be privileging some investors and market participants with a critical information advantage over others.”
The agency said it had investigated all three incidents and had taken action in response — including creating training procedures to ensure that staff members knew what they were allowed to share and with whom, and new safeguards to prevent information from being released early.
“Collectively, we’ve had several incidents that have exposed that we are not sufficiently managing the risk that a mistake” by individual employees could become “an agencywide failure to predictably provide data,” Ms. McEntarfer said.
In a statement released after the interview, she added that the bureau “understands the gravity of this situation and is making every effort, every day, to prevent future mistakes.”
After the most recent incident, Julie Su, the acting secretary of labor, ordered the creation of a team of experts, some from outside the agency, to “identify causes and fixes to the inaccurate release of data” by the agency. She asked the team to report back within 60 days.
Incomplete Explanations
The agency has not released a full accounting of what went wrong in any of the three incidents. And the information it has provided has at times proved inaccurate or incomplete.
For example, the agency initially described the “super users” email as an isolated incident, and denied there was a list of people who received special access to information. But documents obtained by The New York Times through a FOIA request later showed that the economist who sent the original email had been in regular communication with data users in the finance industry, and that he had maintained at least an informal list of super users.
“Would it be possible to be on the super user email list?” one user asked in mid-February, according to emails released by the agency.
“Yes I can add you to the list,” the employee replied minutes later.
The agency has also consistently described the early release of inflation data in May as involving only a “subset of files.” But records show that essentially all the data included in the monthly Consumer Price Index report was published early, even if the official write-up of those figures was not.
That data was downloaded by Bloomberg, the financial news service and data provider. Although Bloomberg’s closely watched economic landing page did not update until the scheduled 8:30 a.m. release time — it has safeguards in place to prevent early data release — some data was visible elsewhere on the company’s terminals, according to a person familiar with the event. Bloomberg declined to comment.
Records obtained through a FOIA request appear to show about 200 I.P. addresses that downloaded the data before the scheduled release time, although the agency redacted the addresses before releasing the documents.
In a statement, the agency said it could not release I.P. addresses because they could reveal the physical location of individuals, which would violate its privacy policies. Ms. McEntarfer said the agency was “still looking into” various other questions raised by the incidents, including why staff members provided information on the jobs revisions by phone before it was posted publicly.
Multiple investigations are underway. In a letter late last month, Ms. Su, the acting labor secretary, asked the department’s inspector general to look into the incidents, which she said “undermine faith in the B.L.S. and must be addressed.”
In April, Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, the top Republican on the Senate committee that oversees the Labor Department, sent a letter to Ms. McEntarfer asking a series of questions about the “super users” incident.
“It is clear that these incidents are not mere ‘mistakes,’” Mr. Cassidy wrote. “There is little doubt that these were intentional disclosures of market-moving information, and that the information was immediately used by the ‘super users.’”
Mr. Cassidy is “aware of the latest incident and is actively conducting oversight,” a spokesman said on Tuesday, referring to the glitch in last month’s release of revised employment data.
Broader Concerns
Defenders of the bureau argue that the recent missteps, though serious, are not indicative of bad intent.
Ernie Tedeschi, a research scholar at Yale Law School who recently served as a White House economic adviser, praised the bureau as “the most user-friendly government agency that I’ve ever dealt with,” and said some of the recent issues might have stemmed from efforts by agency staff members to be helpful to data users.
“They really are quite a gem among the public data agencies,” he said. “They serve the public very well, and they’re very responsive.”
But even the bureau’s staunchest supporters say they worry that the recent incidents leave the agency vulnerable to political attacks.
The revisions announced last month, for example, showed that employers added 818,000 fewer jobs in 2023 and early 2024 than initially reported. The adjustment, though large, was part of a routine process that reconciles monthly survey data with more accurate but less timely data from state unemployment offices.
But Mr. Trump, in a post on social media, said the revisions were evidence that the Biden administration had been “fraudulently manipulating the Jobs Statistics.” Other Republican leaders echoed that claim, without providing evidence.
Economists defended the agency and said there was no evidence of political interference in its work. They said the agency’s willingness to publish the large negative revisions demonstrated its independence.
But they said the political attacks were damaging at a time when statistical agencies were already under pressure. A report from the American Statistical Association this year warned that declining survey response rates and shrinking budgets were putting government data in increasing jeopardy.
“When the response to the snafus is to attack the agency as somehow being incompetent or having a political motive, then those things can suppress the response rate and make appropriators feel that they’re throwing good money after bad,” said Ms. Groshen, the former commissioner. Over time, she warned, that could erode the reliability of federal economic data.
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