Outside Witness Testimony of Erica Groshen to Senate LHHS Appropriations Subcommittee
Erica Groshen, chair of the Friends of BLS, submitted outside witness testimony to the Senate Appropriations subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services in support of increased funding for BLS in FY 2019.
From her testimony:
“The increase in funding BLS received in FY 2018 was beneficial, but it cannot reverse nearly a decade of flat funding. The BLS’s purchasing power has fallen by nearly 14% since 2009. The BLS has taken many steps to implement cost saving measures to make the most of its budget. Currently, BLS is exploring options that include centralizing more data collection, moving to a multi-year sampling and collection protocols, using a combination of collected and modeled data, expanding web scraping techniques and autocoding. Even though these efforts have gone a long way, the current level of funding is not sustainable, and means BLS cannot adequately innovate and rise to new challenges in understanding our changing economy. “