Tuesday was a big day for local economists. It was the first time in more than two months that a new report touching on Colorado’s economy was published by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Sure, it was just the Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey, or JOLTS, an estimate of workers in every state who are getting hired, fired, laid off or just quitting. And the data was kind of dated — from August. But it represented the economic research world getting back to work after the longest federal government shutdown in history ended Nov. 12.
“Yes, it is like welcoming back an old friend,” Gary Horvath, an economist in Broomfield, said in an email. “We are spoiled in the United States, with the quality of our data.”
When the federal government shut down Oct. 1, the federal workers who surveyed consumers and businesses about work were furloughed. Such surveys provide some of the most comprehensive statistics on unemployment and job growth. Similarly, inflation rates based on federal employees comparing prices on food, gas and other consumer goods weren’t done.
The BLS is now saying that some of those stats will never be collected, or at least they definitely won’t be retroactively done for October. And for those who saw the latest JOLTS report, there’s added concern that more data is at risk.
“As for the JOLTS announcement, the thing that most grabbed my attention is that they’re going to discontinue the monthly state-level releases!” Bill Craighead, an economist and program director at the UCCS Economic Forum in Colorado Springs, said in an email. “It didn’t give a reason, but we know the BLS has faced funding and staffing troubles, so it’s definitely concerning to see.”
According to the BLS, the last monthly JOLTS report will be December, which will be published in February. After that, the federal agency will release monthly JOLTS data for the prior year once a year. We’ve reached out to the BLS for comment.
The August report, by the way, noted that Colorado had one of the largest declines in the rate of workers quitting their jobs. Hiring was down from July, while layoffs were 33% higher. And while the number of open jobs, at 130,000, was higher than July, that was down 17% from a year ago.
MIA: October 2025 data
The six-week shutdown delayed other reports as well. State employment and unemployment data from September will be out Dec. 11. October numbers have been canceled since no one collected the data. And there’s no date for the release of November’s job data for states.
Phyllis Resnick, executive director at the Colorado Futures Center, had to put her quarterly report on hold because of the lack of jobs data. The key word here is “Futures.” She relies on an index from the Federal Reserve Bank in Philadelphia to build her forecast to show what might happen in the next quarter in Colorado. But the index relies on employment data from the BLS.
“You can see the cascade that’s already happening,” said Resnick, lead economist at the Center. “I started looking last week to see what if anything was available (and) effectively, there’s nothing. I had a back-and-forth with the Fed and now they’re telling me they’re hearing from the BLS that the jobs data by state should be out on Dec. 16. … Basically, the product our center produces most regularly is completely on hold.”
In the week before Brian Lewandowski and his team at the University of Colorado’s Business Research Division at the Leeds School releases an annual report about Colorado’s current and future economy, he, too, bemoaned the loss of data.
“I was (and am) missing the data,” he said in an email. “The data lags and lapses continue to be a burden for analyzing the economy.”
Disrupted economists
In the 43-days of the shutdown, data release dates came and went — “Q3 GDP, September/October state and national employment, unemployment, personal income, CPI (delayed but released for September), building permits, retail sales, wholesale sales, and many others,” he said.
It makes certain jobs more challenging, like the Federal Open Market Committee’s decision to cut interest rates, he said.
“The lack of information comes at a critical time in an economy that is sending mixed signals — a slowing labor market, elevated inflation, uncertainty about consumption and investment, and the direction of near-term growth,” Lewandowski said. “Analysts and economists have turned to private data sources to glean signals about the health of the economy, but arguably, there are few substitutes for the rich public data collected and remitted by federal agencies.”
Horvath said he looks at private sources like ADP and Revelio for job data “although both those data sets rely on the BLS data to a point,” he added. But he also checks on local reports from Denver International Airport, which said DIA passengers through October were up 0.2% than a year ago and 2024 was a record year. The National Retail Federation is also optimistic about sales and expects to surpass $1 trillion for the first time this holiday season.
The shutdown was six weeks, but there were already other issues with the economy, especially the state’s.
“At this point, the value of the August and September data will be to help estimate the October value,” Horvath said. “The state has been on a lackluster path. The absence of this data will not show a different path.”
U.S. democratizes data
Resnick hopes that past chatter about reporting U.S. economic data less frequently doesn’t become reality. Over the summer, the Trump administration’s pick to head up the BLS, E.J. Antoni, said the monthly jobs report should switch to a quarterly release since constant revisions to the preliminary jobs data makes the initial report inaccurate. Antoni, chief economist for the conservative Heritage Foundation, later withdrew his nomination.
“If the federal government starts to, for whatever reason, pull back either regularity or we haven’t even talked about data integrity yet, there’s probably going to be private providers of data that will try and fill in those gaps,” Resnick said. “There’s already ADP jobs data, but you know it’s only an indicator because it only has as its universe those (employers) that are contracted with ADP.”
For its part, the BLS surveys tens of thousands of businesses and consumers every month. JOLTS is based on a national sample of 16,000 establishments. Some don’t respond until after the first cut-off date, so late responses cause revisions to the data.
The Current Population Survey, which is used to determine the unemployment rate, surveys 60,000 households. The Current Employment Statistics, which surveys 121,000 businesses, helps determine job growth rates. While response rates have been dwindling over the years and it’s uncertain how many folks responded from Colorado, BLS research is one of the most comprehensive around, she said.
It’s also free. And that helps Resnick’s Futures Center, which is part of Colorado State University. Any possible reduction to federal data is a huge concern.
“The ability to do the work that our little center does, or all of our partners across the country, which are relatively small nonprofit centers, will be at a significant disadvantage in doing this kind of work because we won’t have the economic wherewithal to buy the data that we need to do our work,” Resnick said. “It undemocratizes the field in a way. It becomes a playground for the very well-endowed entities who can afford to create their own private data set or buy them. And they’re expensive to buy.”