White House Economist: ‘We Will Never Know’ October Unemployment Rate

A White House economic adviser confirmed Thursday that federal officials won’t be able to determine what the unemployment rate was for last month due to the government shutdown that ended on Wednesday.

“The October employment report for the payroll side will be able to be calculated, but the household survey wasn’t completed,” National Economic Council head Kevin Hassett told reporters outside the White House.

Instead, there will be a “half a jobs report,” he continued. “Most everything else, I think, we’ll be able to concoct the correct number after we look back, but we will never know what the unemployment rate was in October, because there wasn’t a household survey with that.”

Hassett added that the jobs report for September will be released in the coming days, saying that it was completed before the shutdown was initiated on Oct. 1. The most recent jobs report was the one released for August, released on Sept. 5.

The 43-day government shutdown, the longest on record, caused the suspension of data collection, processing, and publishing by the Labor Department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics as well as the Commerce Department’s Census Bureau and Bureau of Economic Analysis.

The employment report is made up of two parts; the household survey from which the unemployment rate is derived, and the establishment survey from which the nonfarm payroll count is calculated. The government surveys businesses and households for the employment report during the week that includes the 12th day of the month.

“The household survey wasn’t conducted in October, so we’re going to get half the employment report. We’ll get the jobs part, but we won’t get the unemployment rate. And that’ll just be for one month,” Hassett said to Fox News on Thursday.

On Wednesday, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said that the lack of data about unemployment numbers and inflation could leave policymakers in the Federal Reserve without the information needed to guide their decisions.

The U.S. central bank is set to meet to set policy for its scheduled Federal Open Market Committee on Dec. 9 and Dec. 10. During the previous meeting, the Fed cut its benchmark interest rate by 0.25 percent to the 3.75 to 4 percent range.

The shutdown may have “permanently damaged the federal statistical system with October CPI and jobs reports likely never being released,” Leavitt told reporters, referring to the consumer price index that is a measure of inflation. “All of that economic data released will be permanently impaired, leaving our policy makers at the [Federal Reserve] flying blind at a critical period.”

Members of Congress had failed to reach an agreement on a stopgap measure to keep the government funding, leading to the shutdown that started on Oct. 1 before President Donald Trump on Wednesday signed into law a package that was passed by the Senate and House this week to reopen the federal government.

Democrats had said that a bill ending the shutdown needed to include an extension of health care subsidies, while Republicans said that the government needed to be reopened before any talks on health care could be initiated.

Reuters contributed to this report.