The BLS has a $700 million budget. What's its ROI?

Marketplace

American Public Media

Business, News

4.6 • 8K Ratings

🗓️ 9 September 2025

⏱️ 27 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Budget cuts may be in the Bureau of Labor Statistics' future. But the data collected by the BLS is critical for federal decision making. In this episode, we calculate if the $700 million investment is worthwhile. Plus: Firms that spend the most on AI slash tons of jobs, economic uncertainty drives up the price of gold, and mortgage rates fall — which is good for buyers but a bad sign for the overall economy.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Yes, it's a lot of jobs not adding.
0:04.2	Yes, it is not great.
0:06.1	But also, yes, it's important to understand exactly what is going on.
0:12.4	From American Public Media, this is Marketplace. In Los Angeles, I'm Kyle Rizdall.
0:27.1	Tuesday 9 September.
0:29.3	Good as always to have you along, everybody.
0:31.6	We begin today with the number 911,000, as you have surely heard by now, that's how many fewer jobs the economy
0:39.7	added from April of last year to March of this year than we had thought.
0:45.2	As I said, not great, but as I also said, or more accurately perhaps implied, it is complicated.
0:52.4	Catherine Ann Edwards is a labor economist.
0:54.3	She's also the host of the Optimist Economy podcast.
0:57.5	Welcome back to the program.
0:59.5	Thank you so much for having me.
1:01.0	So this is a big number.
1:03.1	Let's do the gut check first.
1:04.6	What was your first thought?
1:06.9	It was actually about in line with what I thought it would say.
1:09.9	Really?
1:17.6	Yes, it's a big number, but we've known for a while that our labor market is slowing. We've essentially had a weak and weakening labor market for the past two and a half years.
1:23.6	This twice over weakness has first come and trying to beat back inflation.
1:30.9	And then the labor market itself is being beaten back by tariffs.
1:33.9	The number of jobs posted has been slightly rosy.
	...

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