It’s supposed to be jobs week in America, but like everything else in the country in 2025, politics might f-ck that up.

If the government shuts down midweek, economic reports produced by federal agencies would be postponed.

Donald Trump says he’s willing to meet with Democrats in an eleventh-hour bid to keep the government funded, and maybe he will. Some Democratic strategists recently argued that Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries should force a shutdown as a protest gesture — that lacking options to put the brakes on democratic (small “d”) backsliding, Democrats (capital “D”) should engineer a crisis.

Hell, it works for Trump according to whom — and also because of whom — America’s staring down dozens of crises. What’s one more?

Schumer had a chance to go that route earlier this year and he didn’t take it, reasoning that Trump would exploit a shutdown to seize even more power. He (Schumer) was almost surely correct, and notwithstanding Ezra Klein’s well-meaning efforts to explain what’s different now, the same risk still applies.

Trump’s a master propagandist. He’ll blame any shutdown on Democrats, half the country will believe him and a shuttered federal government in the hands of an aspiring authoritarian is a perilous proposition. A government shutdown constitutes a state of exception. Autocrats revel in such scenarios. Because in a state of exception, the normal rules need not apply.

If the BLS releases the jobs report, it’ll probably show payrolls expanded by 50,000 in September, where “probably” is a reference to the Wall Street consensus. For whatever that’s worth to you.

As reminder no one needs, hiring in the US suffered a bit of a “brake slam” moment in August, when net job creation was a mere 22,000 on the first estimate. Friday’s release — again assuming it is in fact released — will see that tally revised. July’s headline payrolls tally will be adjusted a second time.

At least two members of the Trump administration suggested the August NFP headline will be marked up in the revision. That may be more than positive thinking. The BLS is under enormous pressure. Staff shortages are impeding the agency’s capacity to gather data and Trump over the summer fired Erika McEntarfer, the bureau’s chief.

In remarks to students and faculty at her alma mater this month, McEntarfer called her dismissal — which she found out about through social media — “an attack on the independence of an institution arguably as important as the Federal Reserve for economic stability.” “Messing with economic data is like messing with the traffic lights,” she said.

Meanwhile, the hard economic data in the US has inflected for the better. Last week’s readouts were uniformly encouraging (sans existing home sales) and as the figure below shows, Bloomberg’s hard data surprise index (the prevalence of beats to consensus) looks a lot better all of a sudden.

“As the market saw a series of stronger-than-expected datasets this past week — from New Home Sales to GDP to Trade Balance to Claims, Durables, and PCE — the hard data surprise index has quickly returned to positive territory for the first time since mid-June, climbing 45 points over the course of three trading days,” BMO’s Ian Lyngen remarked, editorializing around the figure.

The Atlanta Fed’s GDPNow model is tracking for nearly 4% growth in Q3. If that’s borne out, it’d mark the second quarter in a row during which the US economy expanded at a ~4% clip. Recall that the BEA marked up GDP growth for Q2 to 3.8% in the final estimate released last week.

The prospect that the jobs report might be suspended pending a resolution to yet another US government spending standoff only serves to reinforce the idea that ADP’s hiring tally will play a larger role going forward. (This is a good time to re-read “ADP’s Revenge.”)

“The emphasis on ADP also stands to increase based on the BLS data quality concerns that are already present in the market, and will likely be raised in the event of a government shutdown,” BMO’s Lyngen went on, in the same note cited above. Consensus for Wednesday’s ADP headline is the same as the NFP consensus: 50,000.

Also on deck this week, in order of importance: ISM manufacturing and services (Wednesday and Friday, respectively), JOLTS (Tuesday), claims (Thursday), Conference Board confidence (Tuesday), pending home sales (Monday) and updates on the national home price indexes (Tuesday).

Oh, and over the weekend Trump posted a cartoon of himself firing Jerome Powell. You can find it sandwiched on his TruthSocial feed between ads for precious metals and Tucker Carlson’s nicotine pouches.