Maybe President Donald Trump is calling his economy “The Golden Age” because it’s expensive.
Over the last week, there’s been a barrage of data trickling out of the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Census Bureau, a backlog of facts and figures after the longest U.S. government shutdown in history. The picture they paint, individually, is in many cases unremarkable. But together, they reveal an economy on the brink, experts told TPM.
That dark picture, experts said, does come with a kind of silver lining: That the agencies could even publish statistical reports and updated release schedules so quickly and thoroughly remains a testament to staff dedication after the unprecedented shutdown, after political attacks on the Census and after the president fired the BLS’s head for releasing data he saw as a political liability.
Trump himself has, of late, seemed acutely aware of the power of such data to determine the success of presidencies. What Americans feel they are able to comfortably buy has been a political flashpoint for several decades. “It’s the economy stupid” became Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign catchphrase. Thirty years later, pandemic-related price hikes saw that declaration back in circulation, with the word “economy” possibly replaced by “inflation” as Joe Biden’s popularity cratered and Trump won a second term in large part based on voters’ concerns with consumer price shocks. At the beginning of November, the new money-related word — “affordability” — came into vogue as Democrats swept the 2025 elections and an until-recently-unknown democratic socialist candidate won a decisive victory in New York City’s mayoral race. (“The new word is ‘affordability.’ Another word, it’s just groceries,” Trump mused last week, insisting that “they are coming down. They are coming down.”)
While the government was shut down and federal economic data halted, Trump had gone on “60 Minutes” and declared “we don’t have inflation. It’s at 2%. It’s the perfect inflation.” That, unfortunately, is not true. Now, after the Democratic victories on Election Day, the president’s bombastic rhetoric came along with new policy proposals out of the White House that purported to address affordability. The proposals don’t all actually stretch consumer dollars, and in at least one case could put buyers at risk.
The BLS and the Census Bureau have been among the first to release backed-up data. Here are five takeaways about the numbers, and the state of the agencies that produced them.
We’re still probably on the edge of a recession
Things aren’t really looking up. Despite the 119,000 new jobs added in September, according to the BLS, the employment report offers no bright spot for the future of hiring.
“What you’re seeing in the real economy is something that is not necessarily tipped into recession, but could be very close depending on these last two months of data,” Alex Jacquez, chief of policy and advocacy at economic policy thinktank Groundwork Collaborative told TPM.
Some major takeaways from the all-important but months-late September jobs report are that nearly all of the jobs added that month came from three segments: health care, food service and social services. Outside of those gains, Axios reported that employment actually decreased by 6,000 jobs during the first nine months of the year. And any gains that have happened have not been distributed equally.
The unemployment rates for women in general, and Black women in particular, have been increasing more quickly than the overall unemployment rate. Between June and September, the unemployment rate for Black women jumped from 5.8% to 7.5%. Black people are considered the canaries in the coal mine, the first to experience economic downturns and signal what’s to come for the rest of the population, experts have told TPM.
“The policy uncertainty on the tariff front is really deterring investment in hiring,” said Jacquez, who served on the National Economic Council under Biden. “Companies are just stuck in neutral. They’re not hiring, they’re not building big factories. They’re just trying to ride this out.”
More and more, tariffs costs are coming to you.
Speaking of tariffs, shoppers may be feeling their weight more than before. After Trump’s April Liberation Day tariffs schedule that shocked the world and set off months of ongoing volatility, importers ate much of the costs associated with tariff-related price hikes, and stockpiled inventory before the additional levies kicked in. Those spring and summer inventories are waning, and businesses are passing down price hikes to consumers more often.
“Up until quite recently companies have been trying to eat as much of the tariffs as possible,” said Jacquez. Companies are now passing through about 55% of the cost of Trump’s tariffs to consumers, according to an analysis from Goldman Sachs.
“We expect over a long enough time horizon for that pass through to be almost complete,” said Jacquez.
Because of the shutdown, the BLS can’t publish its October Consumer Price Index, but the September Producer Price Index published Tuesday shows the cost of goods — including corporate and personal consumption — are up 2.7% year over year.
Released Tuesday, the Conference Board Consumer Confidence Index showed consumer sentiment fell to its second lowest level this year.
This despite, or maybe because of, what the New York Times called the Thanksgiving food cost wars, where grocery companies are touting low meal prep prices to get shoppers in the door, but including fewer items or more generic brands in their holiday dinner bundles to offset higher prices.
If Trump was manipulating data, ‘people would quit’
The federal statistical system has found itself, uncharacteristically, in the spotlight this year. When Trump fired BLS commissioner Ericka McEntarfer over the summer, experts warned against the president trying to interfere with data and chill accurate reporting, while also touting the integrity of agency staffers.
Those fears bubbled back to the surface during the 43-day shutdown, as the president used the economic data blackout to further obscure federal data and bend the truth of the economy, such as with his notable “no inflation” television quip.
But this and last week’s data drops, said Paul Schroeder, executive director of the Council of Professional Associations on Federal Statistics, show just how little sway the executive has over federal statistics, and how dedicated statisticians are to the mission of their agencies.
“The biggest safeguard, the biggest thing that gives me hope in all this craziness with our fed-stat system,” Schroeder told TPM, “is that if data were being manipulated and they were collecting these data, and processing them, and then a different number came out, a large number of people at these agencies would quit.”
There’s no way, said Schroeder and Jacquez, there could be widespread data manipulation from the executive branch without acute public outcry.
Data now gone forever will be just a ‘blip’ in decades-long figures
Despite their dedication and best efforts, some survey-based data and reports will never be published, the BLS announced. The October jobs, CPI and Job Openings and Labor Turnover (JOLTS) reports will never be fully published.
How big of a deal is this? Well, it’s not good. But it’s also not extremely consequential.
“This blip will be there now and it’s more important certainly for the next few months, say through March,” said Schroeder. “And then it’ll sort of become a footnote.”
Market volatility has more to do with interest rates than AI bubbles*
*But they’re still related.
Maybe you’ve noticed the stock market has been a bit wobbly over the last few weeks. Is the AI bubble finally bursting? Not yet, said Kyle Rodda, senior financial market analyst at online trading platform Capital.com.
“If I had to put a number on it, I’d say it’s at least 80/20 Fed rate uncertainty over AI concerns,” said Rodda in an email. But the issues are intertwined. “The uncertainty regarding Fed policy relates directly to inflationary risks. Much of that inflation risk is due to the investment boom in AI.”
Investor sentiment about whether the Federal Reserve Board will further lower borrowing costs before year’s end is what’s pushing and pulling markets in dizzying directions. The shutdown data blackout kept decision makers and investors in the dark, guessing about what the economy was doing and what that meant for interest rate decisions. As federal economic indicators released post-shutdown showed a sluggish job market and creeping inflation, and Federal Reserve governors hinted at rate cuts publicly, investors quickly and sharply reacted.
“There are legitimate fears about AI [return on investment],” Rodda said. “But that’s a longer term fear.”