President Donald Trump and his helpers are cheering prematurely over some good economic numbers that came out this month, according to Los Angeles Times reporter Michael Hiltzik.

On Dec. 18, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reported that inflation had fallen to an annual rate of 2.7 percent in November, down from 3 percent in September. Then, on Tuesday, the Bureau of Economic Analysis reported that real gross domestic product had gone up by a surprising 4.3 percent annual rate in the third quarter of 2025....

“Um, not so fast,” said Hiltzik, pointing out that the 43-day government shutdown from Oct. 1 to Nov. 12 was the most important cause of gaps in the collected data for the consumer price index calculation.

“You've got to take it with a grain of salt," said Diane Swonk, chief economist at KPMG US, of the inflation report. "It's confusing and it doesn't quite square with prices that we've observed."

Swonk said Trump’s steep cutbacks at the BLS had already reduced the staff assigned to sampling prices by 25 percent. That prompted the agency to substitute "imputed" numbers in lieu of hard data.

"Those cases can show up as zeros in the percent change of the release," Swonk wrote, which lowers the bottom-line figure. In fact, a sampling scheduled for mid-October had to be canceled, so figures dating from August were used instead. This conceals any price increases in subsequent months.

“A major problem concerns housing costs, which account for about one-third of the data inputs for the (Consumer Price Index),” Hiltzik reports. “Because the BLS was unable to collect rental data for October, it implied that the monthly change in rents was 0 percent in October — further skewing the reported CPI lower. Experts say it will take at least six months to use newly collected data to provide a reliable estimate of housing inflation.”