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

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

Require the Consumer Price Index basket to include family-essential goods

Not started

588 18. Department of Labor and Related Agencies

“Congress should require that the Consumer Price Index market basket include measurable family-essential goods.”

What has happened

  1. Not started

    No bill of the 119th Congress requires the Consumer Price Index market basket to include measurable family-essential goods, and BLS has made no such change to the CPI. The market basket is set by BLS from the Consumer Expenditure Survey. BLS's own CPI notices archive at `bls.gov/cpi/notices/`, read on 2026-09-03, lists every notice the program has issued inside the window: "Notice of CPI collection reductions", "More information on CPI collection reductions", "Recent and upcoming methodology changes: 2025", "Questions and answers on the 2025 federal government shutdown impact on the Consumer Price Index", "Upcoming Consumer Price Index Publication Changes", "Changes to R-CPI-NTR and R-CPI-ATR publication schedule", "Updated seasonal factors introduced February 13, 2026", "BLS engaged expert panels regarding missing Consumer Expenditure data and its impact on the Consumer Price Index", "Rebasing of Selected Consumer Price Index Series", the "2028 Geographic Revision Notice", two electricity corrections and two data-conference registrations. None of them adds family-essential goods to the basket, and the only changes to the basket's inputs run the other way. The two Evidence items below moved the other way: "BLS is reducing sample collection in areas across the country. In April, BLS suspended CPI data collection entirely in Lincoln, NE, and Provo, UT. In June, BLS suspended collection entirely in Buffalo, NY … BLS makes reductions when current resources can no longer support the collection effort", and "Roughly 15 percent of the sample in the other 72 areas also was suspended from collection, on average."

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.
  • Corrected 2026-09-03: this note previously said bls.gov “was not reachable for this pass”. It is reachable on the full-headers rung of scripts/fetch-page.mjs — a plain curl gets a refusal, the full Chrome header set gets the document. bls.gov/cpi/notices/ is the CPI notices archive, indexed by year back to 2017, and it is the right instrument for this ask: a change to the market basket would be announced there, not in the Federal Register.
  • Reach of the negative, per §3b: it now covers the bill record, the Federal Register, and BLS’s own published notices about the CPI for the whole window. It does not reach unannounced internal weighting decisions, which BLS documents in the biennial weight updates rather than by notice.
Action
other
Object
Consumer Price Index market basket
ID
1619