November 20, 2015
CEPR’s Dean Baker is one of the 63 prominent economists who sent a letter to the heads of the Senate and House Appropriations Committees on Wednesday, urging full funding for the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS).
Signers of the letter include Angus Deaton, winner of the 2015 Nobel Prize in Economics, and come from across the political spectrum, such as the past chairs of the Council of Economic Advisers under President Obama (Austan Goolsbee) and President George W. Bush (Glenn Hubbard).
The BLS is the source of data that is relied upon by business leaders, the government, and experts in assessing the state of the economy. For example, the BLS generates the government’s official measures of unemployment, which are the basis of CEPR’s monthly Jobs Byte report.
Many of CEPR’s analyses of the labor force rely upon BLS data. And as a service to fellow researchers and academics, CEPR also maintains user-friendly versions of BLS data at ceprDATA.org.
In their letter to Congress, Dean and his fellow economists point out that, “[t]he very nature of work in the U.S. economy is changing. Now is not the time to cut funding for the main institution charged with tracking these changes,” and caution that, “Hampering the BLS’s ability to gather and report timely, accurate, and relevant data causes ripple effects throughout the federal government, the business community, and the U.S. economy.”
They also note that the BLS’s budget “…is down more than 10 percent since 2010. The Senate Appropriations Committee proposes another round of cuts for FY2016. Although House appropriators have called for a modest increase in BLS spending, their figure still falls $23 million short of the President’s request and does not come close to off-setting the funding shortfalls of the last five years.”
You can read full text of the letter here. The organizers of the letter, the Economic Innovation Group, have also started a social media conversation about this topic with the hashtag #SaveTheData.
