Federal Agency That Monitors Globalization to Be Eliminated

A federal program that has tracked the human toll of outsourcing and offshoring for nearly two decades is being shut down — a casualty not of policy debate, but of across-the-board budget cuts that have left statisticians scrambling to protect core operations by sacrificing others.

A Program Built to Track Globalization’s Fallout

The Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Mass Layoff Statistics program has, since the 1990s, functioned as one of the federal government’s few systematic tools for measuring exactly how globalization reshapes the American workforce. Whenever an employer laid off 50 or more workers from a single establishment within a five-week window — triggering a wave of new unemployment insurance claims — state agencies would follow up to determine why. Crucially, the program didn’t just count job losses; it categorized them, distinguishing layoffs tied to seasonal work or contract completion from those tied to what the program’s own methodology calls “movement of work” — jobs relocated to another company facility, outsourced to a domestic contractor, or shifted overseas entirely, according to the BLS’s own technical documentation of the program.

That distinction made Mass Layoff Statistics uniquely valuable to economists and policymakers studying globalization’s effect on American workers — it was one of the only federal data sources that could put a number on how many layoffs, specifically, resulted from work moving to another country rather than from ordinary business fluctuations.

Sequestration Claims Its Victim

The program’s elimination traces directly to March 1, when President Obama allowed the across-the-board spending cuts known as sequestration to take effect under the Balanced Budget and Emergency Deficit Control Act. The order required BLS to cut more than $30 million — five percent of its 2013 appropriation — by September 30. Facing that mandate, the agency chose to eliminate two programs entirely in order to protect its other, higher-priority statistical operations: Mass Layoff Statistics, and a separate program that measured “green jobs” across the economy.

BLS confirmed the May 2013 mass layoffs report — released in June — would be the program’s final monthly publication, ending a data series that had tracked mass layoffs continuously for more than 15 years. That final report recorded 1,301 mass layoff actions in May alone, affecting 127,821 workers nationwide — a reminder, in the data series’ last act, of exactly the scale of disruption the program had spent nearly two decades attempting to measure and explain.

A Familiar Pattern: This Isn’t the First Time

This isn’t actually the first time budget pressure has claimed this particular program. An earlier version of Mass Layoff Statistics was eliminated once before, in November 1992, “primarily for lack of funding,” before being revived and restructured in the years that followed. That history underscores a recurring vulnerability facing federal statistical programs more broadly: even data series with genuine, demonstrated analytical value can find themselves treated as expendable whenever budget-cutting exercises require agencies to find savings quickly, with relatively little political cost compared to cutting benefit programs with direct, visible constituencies.

What Gets Lost When the Measuring Stops

For researchers and advocates who relied on the program, its elimination represents something more than the loss of one data series among many. Mass Layoff Statistics had been used in academic research specifically to document and quantify the relationship between rising imports, outsourcing, and job losses in the manufacturing sector — the kind of granular, categorized data that allowed researchers to move beyond anecdote and establish, empirically, how much of America’s job losses in any given period could be traced specifically to globalization rather than domestic economic conditions.

With the program gone, that specific analytical capability disappears along with it — not because the underlying phenomenon of outsourcing-driven layoffs has stopped happening, but because the federal government will no longer be systematically counting and categorizing it. Advocates for workers affected by trade-related job loss have warned that losing the data makes it considerably harder to build the empirical case for stronger worker protections in future trade agreements — an ironic casualty, given that trade policy debates were often exactly where this data proved most useful.

For related coverage of labor market and trade policy issues, see our piece on food safety concerns amid the TPA fast-track fight, or browse our full Policy & Rights archive.