Sept. 10 (UPI) — The U.S. Department of Labor’s Office of the Inspector General announced Wednesday that it will conduct a review of the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ collection and reporting activities for the Consumer Price Index and the Producer Price Index.
In a letter to the BLS’s acting director, William Wiatrowski, the OIG announced the intent to review the department.
“Our focus will be on the challenges and related mitigating strategies for (1) collecting PPI and CPI data, and (2) collecting and reporting, including revising, monthly employment data,” said the letter from Laura Nicolosi, assistant inspector general for audit.
The announcement arrives just weeks after President Donald Trump fired the BLS administrator Erika McEntarfer in August after a weak monthly jobs report. He has nominated conservative economist E.J. Antoni to replace her, but the nomination hasn’t yet been confirmed by the Senate.
The letter said that the BLS recently issued “a large downward revision of its estimate of new jobs in the monthly Employment Situation Report.”
The Labor Department in a preliminary report Tuesday revised jobs data sharply downward for the year ending March 2025 — a drop of 911,000 from initial estimates. The revisions were the largest in more than 20 years.
The BLS has long said that lower survey response rates and other trends have made it harder to measure the state of the U.S. economy, the New York Times reported. But experts inside and outside the agency say a lack of resources slows its efforts to mitigate those challenges.