As you might’ve heard, the Trump administration’s recalling a handful of furloughed BLS statisticians this week.

The decision isn’t motivated by a desire to keep the public (and the Fed) informed about the trajectory of the world’s largest economy. Rather, The Social Security Administration needs last month’s missing inflation report to calculate cost-of-living adjustments.

COLAs are based on a simple formula which uses the average of Q3’s CPI-W readouts. Without September’s CPI release, that calculation isn’t possible, and it has to be finalized in October.

So, much to the chagrin of an administration leveraging the government shutdown to accelerate the programmatic “purification” of America’s bureaucracy — an effort which, beginning over the summer, impacted the highest ranks of the BLS leadership — a handful of number-crunchers are back at it for the week.

Hopefully, those folks will be paid for their work at some point. But Donald Trump’s variously suggested that this time around, backpay’s not guaranteed depending on who you are, and what government role you held.

That’s the backdrop for an inflation report which is expected to show MoM core price growth ran 0.3% in September, rounded of course. Recall that the last two unrounded core CPI prints were 0.34595% and 0.32234%. A consensus read would thus mark the third straight month during which underlying price growth was 0.3% or higher.

The figure above’s a reminder: Core CPI rarely prints below the threshold that’s consistent with 2% annual inflation. Frankly, I don’t think the Fed cares anymore. If that’s too strong (and it probably is), it’s fair to suggest the Committee isn’t going to do what it takes to bludgeon the monthly prints back in line with a 2% YoY pace. Rather, they’re depending on the situation “working itself out,” so to speak, through labor market normalization.

The Fed’s almost guaranteed to deliver another 25bps cut later this month and Stephen Miran’s going to dissent again in favor of 50bps. That, with equities trading on the richest forward multiple in 40 years and IG credit spreads near record tights.

I suppose it’s possible the Trump administration can thread this needle by — I don’t know — engineering just enough labor market weakness to prompt Fed cuts and cap demand such that services price growth doesn’t reaccelerate, but not so much labor market weakness that job losses snowball into a recession. Suffice to say some observers are skeptical. The tariffs are another wild card.

“Our focus will be on core-goods ex-autos and supercore, the former [as a] gauge of the degree to which tariff pass-through has continued to flow into the realized data and the latter [as a canary] of widening reflationary pressures,” BMO’s Ian Lyngen remarked.

Also on the otherwise sparse US data docket this week: Existing home sales and preliminary PMIs for October. Both of those are private sector releases, so they’re unaffected by the shutdown.

“One of the biggest concerns created by the shutdown is the distortions it will likely create from the perspective of data collection,” Lyngen went on, in the same note. “Much of the data included in CPI is collected in-person, so in the event that the lights aren’t turned back on in Washington until November, the quality/reliability of the October CPI release is a true wildcard.”

Meanwhile, HHS, Homeland Security and Treasury said a temporary restraining order blocking the Trump administration from carrying out mass layoffs during the shutdown isn’t relevant for some 2,000 people who’ve already been fired across those departments.