The Bureau of Labor Statistics BLS

The Bureau of Labor was created on June 27, 1884, inside the Interior Department, after years of strikes convinced Congress that the government should at least know what workers earned and how they lived. Its first commissioner, Carroll Wright, set a standard of nonpartisan fact-finding that the agency has defended ever since. The bureau moved into the Department of Labor at its founding in 1913 and began publishing the cost-of-living index that became the Consumer Price Index during World War I, when the government needed it to set shipyard wages.

The first Friday of most months the bureau releases the Employment Situation, better known as the jobs report, at 8:30 in the morning Eastern time, and for a few minutes nothing else in financial markets matters. The report combines a survey of about 120,000 businesses, which yields the count of jobs added, with the Current Population Survey of about 60,000 households, conducted for the bureau by the Census Bureau, which yields the unemployment rate. The Consumer Price Index, released mid-month, tracks the prices of a basket of goods and services and adjusts Social Security benefits, tax brackets, union contracts, and Treasury inflation-protected bonds. The Producer Price Index, the Employment Cost Index, and productivity figures round out the core.

About 2,000 employees produce these numbers on a budget near 700 million dollars, a small agency for the weight its output carries. The Commissioner is appointed by the President and confirmed by the Senate for a four-year term, a design meant to span administrations. The bureau's data are locked down before release, with reporters sequestered and embargoed, and its methods are published in detail so that anyone can check them. Economists in both parties have long treated the bureau as the gold standard among the world's statistical agencies.

That reputation was tested in August 2025 when the President dismissed the Commissioner hours after a jobs report that revised earlier months sharply downward, accusing the bureau of manipulating the figures. Statisticians, former commissioners, and economists across the spectrum objected that revisions are routine and that no evidence of manipulation existed. The episode raised the question that statistical agencies are built to avoid: whether the numbers the government publishes can be trusted when they are politically inconvenient. Response rates to the bureau's surveys, falling for a decade, remain a separate and longer-running concern.