The 2009 Presidents Budget for the Bureau of Labor Statistics
On February 4, 2008, President Bush submitted his 2009 Federal budget to Congress. The Presidents Budget provides $592.8 million in funding to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) for the 2009 fiscal year that will begin on October 1, 2008.
The 2009 budget request restores funding that the 2008 Presidents Budget requested for the BLS, but which was not received, including funds for a critical updating of the Consumer Price Index. If the restoration of the 2008 funding reductions are not provided in 2009, permanent
reductions to BLS products would have to be taken on top of the reductions to the American Time Use Survey and Locality Pay Surveys described below. The 2009 budget request also includes funds for a program increase for the Current Population Survey.
2009 Budget Highlights
The 2009 Presidents Budget for the BLS includes:
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Restoring temporary reductions that occurred in 2008 ($19.2 million).
2008 funding for the BLS was considerably below the requested amount. As a result, the BLS
temporarily curtailed products, delayed infrastructure investments, and instituted significant
staffing reductions. More specific information on the 2008 temporary reductions may be found
at http://www.bls.gov/bls/budgetimpact.htm.
The 2009 Presidents Budget restores these necessary funds, without which the BLS
would have to eliminate or reduce core BLS programs and data products besides those
already included in the 2009 budget request.
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Modernizing the Consumer Price Index (CPI) ($10.4 million). The CPI is the Nations
most widely used measure of inflation. This initiative, previously included in the 2008
Presidents Budget, would substantially improve the accuracy of the CPI by continuously updating
the housing and geographic area samples. This initiative also would enable the BLS to complete
the continuous updating efforts in all major components of the CPI begun in 2002. Historically,
updated samples were introduced about every ten years as part of the periodically funded CPI
revisions. The current samples are based on information from the 1990 decennial census, now
18 years old. Continuous updating from this initiative would result in samples that better
reflect the geographic distribution of the U.S. population and its demographic and economic
characteristics.
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Funding the rising costs of the Current Population Survey (CPS) ($8.7 million).
This initiative would ensure the continued accuracy of the national unemployment rate, labor
force participation rate, women's-to-men's earnings ratio, and many other key indicators obtained from
the CPS. Gathering information from the sample of 60,000 households each month has become more
costly largely because of more stringent efforts to protect the sensitive information provided
by those households, a greater geographic dispersal of the survey sample, and costs associated
with the publics growing reluctance to provide information. If this funding is not received,
twenty-five percent of the sample will have to be eliminated.
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Eliminating the American Time Use Survey (ATUS) ($4.4 million). In order to partially
offset the CPS cost increase mentioned above, the BLS will eliminate the ATUS. The ATUS provides
nationally representative estimates of how Americans spend their time, including time
working and time doing nonmarket activities, such as child care and volunteering. ATUS data
enables researchers to develop broader assessments of national well-being and domestic
production.
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Reducing the Locality Pay Surveys (LPS) ($1.5 million). In order to partially fund
inflationary cost increases for its other core programs, the BLS will reduce the LPS component
of the National Compensation Survey (NCS), thereby reducing the level of detail in LPS
publications and the number of future publications. The NCS sample reduction, approximately
nine percent, will impact all three NCS program outputs: the Employment Cost Index, the
Employee Benefits Survey, and the LPS.
The 2009 Presidents Budget for BLS may be viewed in full
at http://www.dol.gov/dol/budget/2009/PDF/CBJ-2009-V3-01.pdf
Last Modified Date: April 11, 2008
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