AILSA CHANG, HOST:
Well, the government shutdown is over, but it could take a while to make up for all the economic reports that we missed over the last six weeks. The federal workers who keep tabs on unemployment, inflation, spending and the like are back on the job, and once they return to their actual desks, they can get back to measuring how the U.S. economy is doing. But in the meantime, NPR's Scott Horsley joins us now to fill us in. Hey, Scott.
SCOTT HORSLEY, BYLINE: Hi.
CHANG: Hi. OK, so what kind of economic numbers were not released during the shutdown, and what is it going to take to fill that void?
HORSLEY: Well, we missed the numbers on pretty much everything that....
CHANG: (Laughter).
HORSLEY: ...Government economists usually keep tabs on - jobs, prices, retail spending, GDP. The people who tabulate those numbers were furloughed during the shutdown, and, you know, now they got to get the cobwebs off their desk and try to make up for lost time.
CHANG: Yeah.
HORSLEY: We should get the September jobs report pretty quickly. That was almost done when the shutdown began. And we did get an inflation report for September because Social Security had to have that to calculate next year's cost-of-living adjustment. But so far, we have not seen reports for October on either jobs or unemployment or inflation.
Omair Sharif, who runs a firm called Inflation Insights, says the unemployment numbers might be the hardest to reconstruct. You have to call thousands of people to ask what they were doing a month ago now. And even before the shutdown, the bureau that compiles that report was shorthanded because of the Trump administration's job cuts.
OMAIR SHARIF: Even under a best-case scenario, this would be really difficult to go back and collect data that's from the month of October, but now you're trying to do that with - you know, maybe running at 75% of your normal staffing.
HORSLEY: A White House spokeswoman suggested the government might just skip some of the October reports and go straight to work on November's data. This is the week when the November jobs tally would ordinarily be conducted.
CHANG: Wait. But what would it mean if some of the reports were just skipped altogether?
HORSLEY: Well, hard to say. It's never happened before, and it's not at all clear it will happen this time. The government did skip a few minor reports after the 2013 shutdown, but we've never had a major economic indicator that was just left blank forever. Even during the early months of the pandemic, when government price-checkers couldn't go out to supermarkets and scan the 40,000 grocery items they usually do, they found workarounds. And Sharif says even if the data isn't as comprehensive as usual, government number crunchers will do their best to avoid missing a major report like inflation.
SHARIF: It's an important data point, No. 1. But No. 2, you just - you don't want to leave a hole in your time series. So the continuity of the data is a bit more important than, you know, ensuring, like, the normal level of accuracy.
HORSLEY: Former government officials I've talked to say if there are adjustments in how the data is collected or how many people are surveyed, the government will let us know so the people who rely on these figures know what they're dealing with.
CHANG: And who does rely on this data? Like, this is important stuff, right?
HORSLEY: Oh, yeah. It informs decisions for businesses and investors. It helps the Federal Reserve decide where to set interest rates. You know, for six weeks they've all had to look to other signals to - as they try to take the temperature of the economy, but pretty much everyone agrees there's no substitute for the reach of the federal government's numbers. It's going to take some time for government number crunchers to get back in the groove, so economic reports are likely to be delayed for probably the rest of the year. But Nancy Vanden Houten, who's with the forecasting firm Oxford Economics, says that's not the end of the world.
NANCY VANDEN HOUTEN: I mean, sure, it will make it challenging at what is a bit of an uncertain time anyway, but I think we'll be able to piece it together. And, you know, as we look to early next year, the regular data flow should be on track.
HORSLEY: She says there were a lot of other hardships caused by the shutdown that were worse, and some of those may eventually show up in the government data.
CHANG: That is NPR's Scott Horsley. Thank you, Scott.
HORSLEY: You're welcome. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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