Elizabeth Weber Handwerker

Revised news release dates following the 2025 lapse in appropriations Revised news release dates following the 2025 lapse in appropriations

Currently refreshing www.bls.gov/bls/2025-lap...

Currently refreshing live.house.gov

It could matter for business cycle dating. Plus, losing a month (especially given current response rates) will affect whether there is sufficient sample to publish quarterly or even annual estimates for smaller populations.

The unemployment and price data matter for more than long-term trends--they are among the first indicators of a change in the business cycle.

The MAHA-Fueled Rise of Natural Family Planning

A whole article about people advocating eschewing modern birth control because they want to avoid artificial hormones, and the reporter never asks why they don't just advocate for Paragard (the very effective and easily reversible no-hormone IUD) instead? www.nytimes.com/2025/11/09/u...

Bridges and borders: Economic policy across North America This conference organized by PIIE and the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas examines key policy and economic challenges shaping the future of North American integration, with a focus on labor mobility, r...

Trying to use my furlough well. Yesterday, I went on a long bike ride and fixed things around the house. This morning, I have soup simmering in the stove and children's clothing to mend while I listen to www.piie.com/events/2025/...

Why is it that every disappeared US citizen is not front page news? At the very least we should have a little box with a count of the number of citizens who have been taken away and are not locatable and a link to a story with photos & min-bios, just as we used to do with military casually figures.

Squash stuffed with lentils, wild rice, and cranberries.

Skip a main dish entirely and do a bunch of different salads, including at least one with chickpeas or lentils. Then add a lukshen kugel for the kids.

You need to drop the last two characters from that link to make it work.

I'm grateful for the cancer treatments that saved my life, with fewer side effects than previous treatments. I'm grateful to everyone who drove my kids to activities and brought my family meals during the worst of treatments. (I'm also grumpy about being slower and creakier than I was a year ago.)

I still lost my hair (it's growing back now). And my running and hiking speed is slower than a year ago. And I'm generally creakier. But because my job is not physically demanding and I was able to work from home during treatment, I only had to take about 120 hours of sick leave from my job!

I benefitted from data collection and research. Models based on data (common cancer = data) showed how much each treatment would reduce the likelihood of cancer coming back. I received more effective treatments with fewer side effects (common cancer = studies) than people received only a decade ago.

A year ago, I noticed a new lump in my body. Medical tests showed I had a very treatable early stage common cancer. Over the past year, I had surgery to remove the lump, plus chemotherapy, radiation, and continuing medication to reduce the likelihood of it coming back. I learned a few things:

12 years ago today I went back to work at BLS at the end of the 2013 shutdown. I remember watching then-Associate Commissioner Wiatrowsky pushing a cart into the building stacked with dozens of pizzas for his staff.

I don't think BLS staff can return to work after a lengthy shutdown and produce data releases at the pre-announced deadlines, even if they return before these deadlines.

New proposed AEWR methodology dropped today: www.federalregister.gov/documents/20...

Days of government shutdown | Trade on Kalshi Track what Kalshi's markets predict for "Days of government shutdown", or trade it yourself.

And now I start working my way through that list. I'm glad to have some extra time for home production in the middle of my holiday season, but frustrated to be forced to pause what I was in the middle of doing yesterday.

And I really don't like the look of this: kalshi.com/markets/kxgo...

Time to write my annual list of home production tasks to complete if there is a lapse in federal appropriations.

YouTube video by Jason Chen for Melrose City Councilor-at-Large A $107.5M pallet of cash! Let's see where our revenue comes from in our Melrose FY26 city budget

I really like the way my brother-in-law (the candidate for public office) presents his city's budget visually in this pair of videos: youtu.be/RehrElsji7w?... and youtu.be/UQ8Ohc1six0?...

I finally had a chance to listen to this talk in full. Worth hearing. And someone asked Erika about changes in the imputation of CPI data at the very end; her answer was illuminating.

One of my colleagues wrote a 2 page overview of the H-1B program. Among other topics, it explains that not all employers are subject to the "cap," and shows trends in the number of these visas:

www.congress.gov/crs-product/...

papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

Happy Constitution Day! I like the resources the Library of Congress has assembled on the Constitution: constitution.congress.gov

I've been reading about what Generative AI is and is not good for. It can be summed up as "Aggregating data without a underlying model of how things work."

Seems very similar to the way many economists see the shortcomings of data science (when it isn't combined with domain knowledge).

YouTube video by Jason Chen for Melrose City Councilor-at-Large Melrose will soon break ground on our Engine 2 fire station. Check out the design!

Looking for a non-stressful video from somebody running for office? My talented brother-in-law is running for a small city council in Massachusetts, and illustrated upcoming city infrastructure plans on camera: youtu.be/ofTRdLS9zP4?...

At 10am on Tuesday, BLS will publish preliminary benchmark revisions for March 2025 employment for all 50 states, the District of Columbia, and selected metropolitan areas at the total nonfarm level. www.bls.gov/sae/notices/...

See below for a 2-page reference explanation of benchmark revisions.

I call it "calendar Tetris."

Amid Fight Over H-2A Wages, Trump Administration Moves to End Farm Labor Survey The U.S. Department of Agriculture announced it will end the Agricultural Labor Survey just days after a federal judge in Louisiana threw out the Biden administration's wage rule for H-2A workers that...

This article calls it "a regulatory vacuum": www.dtnpf.com/agriculture/...