US Labor Department statistical agency hiring part-time economists for the CPI report

WASHINGTON, Sept 15 (Reuters) - The Labor Department's Bureau of Labor Statistics, under fire for recent sharp downward revisions to U.S. nonfarm payrolls and reductions to inflation data collection, is hiring about 25 part-time assistant economists, job postings showed.

The positions advertised on USAjobs.gov, scattered across the country, are in the BLS's Division of Price Programs, namely the Consumer Price Index (CPI) program.

The Labor Department's inspector general's office said last week it was initiating a review of challenges the statistical agency faced in collecting and reporting economic data.

Sharp downgrades last month to May and June payrolls figures totaling 258,000 jobs angered U.S. President Donald Trump, who fired BLS Commissioner Erika McEntarfer, accusing her, without evidence, of faking the employment data. Trump has nominated E.J. Antoni, chief economist at the conservative think tank Heritage Foundation, to replace McEntarfer.

The BLS has suffered from years of inadequate funding under both Democratic and Republican administrations.

Like all government agencies, it has been severely affected by the Trump administration's mass firings, voluntary resignations, early retirements and hiring freezes, part of an unprecedented campaign by the White House to drastically reduce the size of government.

Last week, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick in an interview with Axios, criticized Elon Musk's mass firings of federal workers when the billionaire headed the Department of Government Efficiency. The BLS, whose workforce is estimated to have been reduced by about 15%, has suspended data collection for portions of the CPI basket in some areas across the country.

It has also ended the calculation and publication of about 350 indexes in the producer price report.

That has raised concerns over the quality of the data, including the closely watched monthly employment report, which has recently been the subject of big downward revisions. U.S. economic data has long been viewed as the gold standard.

The BLS is using imputations, a statistical method used by economists to estimate values and fill in the missing information in the CPI basket. The share of different cell imputations in the CPI data increased to 36% in August from only 9% in August 2024.

The Commerce Department's Census Bureau is also hiring about 46 field workers and supervisors. Field workers with the Census Bureau assist with the collection of data for the CPI and the household survey component of the employment report.