For the second time in as many quarters, a breakdown in the federal appropriations process has delayed the release of crucial economic indicators relied on by businesses, investors, consumers and policymakers to inform their views of U.S. market conditions.
Hopes that a brief and partial federal government shutdown would filter through the economic calendar unnoticed were dashed Monday when the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) announced that a pair of labor reports initially scheduled for release this week have been postponed.
The BLS will reschedule publication of December’s Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey (JOLTS), originally planned for Tuesday, and January’s Employment Situation report, initially scheduled for Friday, “once funding is restored,” the statistics agency said in a statement.
Now in its fourth day, the partial shutdown arrives close on the heels of last fall’s longest government closure in U.S. history, lasting 43 days from Oct. 1 to Nov. 12. Hundreds of thousands of federal workers were furloughed due to that shutdown, which cost the U.S. economy as much as $11 billion, according to estimates reported by Reuters.
Around 3,400 of the Labor Department’s almost 13,000 employees are expected to work through the funding lapse, or about 25% of its workforce, with the remaining three-quarters of the agency’s staff receiving furloughs, according to its shutdown planning document.
With the unemployment rate declining from 4.6% in November to 4.4% in December, Federal Reserve officials cited stabilization in a gradually cooling labor market when voting last week to leave the federal funds rate unchanged at their first policy meeting of 2026.
Economists polled by The Wall Street Journal forecast that Friday’s postponed jobs report for January would have shown no change in the national jobless rate and slight improvements in nonfarm payrolls, with 60,000 jobs added compared to 50,000 additions in December.
Revisions made by BLS last month trimmed 76,000 jobs from earlier estimates of October and November payroll numbers, a period that spanned the previous government shutdown. Global tax audit and consulting firm KPMG says U.S. employers added just 584,000 jobs in 2025, the weakest annual pace since 2009, excluding pandemic-driven distortions in 2020.
The now-postponed JOLTS report for December would have closed the book on official tallies of last year’s pace of job openings, hirings and firings, pending subsequent revisions. Job openings plummeted to 14-month lows in November, but layoffs did not accelerate. Economists surveyed by the Journal estimated that job openings would remain flat from November to December at around 7.1 million.
The current, partial shutdown began last weekend as funding lapsed on Jan. 31 for a slew of federal offices, including but not limited to the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Department of State, the Department of Transportation and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) — the agency whose immigration enforcement operations are the object of the impasse.
The House of Representatives is expected to begin a procedural vote on a bipartisan, Senate-backed funding package endorsed by President Donald Trump at 11:15 a.m. EST, with a vote on final passage of the package expected after 1 p.m.
The bill would fund most government agencies through September but would only fund DHS for two weeks, as Democrats demand oversight on the president’s aggressive immigration and custom enforcement tactics in exchange for funding extensions.
