Project 2025 Tracker / What’s done, what’s next

18. Department of Labor and Related Agencies · Minor · Needs Congress

Create a monthly BLS pilot survey of American family wellbeing

Not started

588 18. Department of Labor and Related Agencies

“Congress should require the Bureau to establish a pilot survey with a sample comparable to the BLS Current Population Survey that would publish monthly estimates for measures of the American family’s wellbeing, and appropriate sufficient funds for that purpose.”

What has happened

  1. Not started

    No bill of the 119th Congress requires the Bureau of Labor Statistics to run a monthly pilot survey of family wellbeing on a Current Population Survey-sized sample, and no appropriation for one has been enacted.

    No action found yet. This entry is the starting point, not a finding.

Research log

What was searched, and what didn’t count as evidence

Research notes

  • Negative search: chapter log, Cluster negative search — the BLS, CPI and retirement-limit asks.
  • Executive Order 14359, Fostering the Future for American Children and Families (2025-11-13), is the nearest instrument in the window and is about pro-family policy across agencies, not about a BLS statistical product. Under §3b it is an adjacent instrument, not this ask.
  • Read 2026-09-03, and the direction of travel is contrary: BLS’s own newsroom, its CPI notices archive (bls.gov/cpi/notices/) and its leadership roster show no new survey of any kind in the window. What the window contains is suspension and reduction — CPI collection suspended entirely in Lincoln NE, Provo UT and Buffalo NY and roughly 15 percent of the sample suspended in the other 72 areas (bls.gov/cpi/notices/2025/collection-reduction.htm, 2025-06-16, and .../more-information-collection-reduction.htm, 2025-07-29), shutdown impacts, and cuts to the R-CPI-NTR and R-CPI-ATR publication schedule. Those notices are about the CPI sample rather than about a family-wellbeing survey, so they evidence the resourcing climate and not a decision on this ask; they are recorded here rather than in history, and they carry #1619’s event. Keeping them out of this item’s frontmatter is deliberate — #1618 and #1619 sit on the same page and the same instrument, and lending it to both is the same-instrument drift §3b warns about.
Action
create
Object
BLS pilot survey of family wellbeing
ID
1618