U.S. consumer prices rose less than expected in the year to November, but households still faced affordability challenges as the costs of basic goods and services like beef and electricity soared, posing a political problem for President Donald Trump.
The moderation in the Consumer Price Index, reported by the Labor Department's Bureau of Labor Statistics on Thursday, was likely due in part to the 43-day federal government shutdown, which delayed data collection until the second half of November, when retailers were offering holiday season discounts.
The CPI data is normally collected throughout the month. Economists cautioned against reading too much into what some dubbed a "Swiss-cheese" report.
But White House officials quickly heralded what Trump's top economic adviser called "an astonishingly good" report, hours after the president delivered a televised address to the nation focused on affordability. The higher cost of living will remain a political issue in 2026 as Trump and his fellow Republicans battle to retain control of the U.S. Congress.
The shutdown prevented the BLS from publishing month-to-month changes for November's CPI, as most of the price data for October was not collected, creating big gaps that economists said made the report less reliable than normal.
The October CPI release was canceled because the data could not be collected retroactively. It was the first time the BLS did not publish monthly CPI rates.
Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell told reporters last week that policymakers were going to look at the delayed economic data "carefully and with a somewhat skeptical eye, given the disruptions to collection during the shutdown."
Economists expect a pickup in December as businesses are still passing on higher costs from import tariffs to consumers, and the rapid growth of artificial intelligence and cloud computing data centers is boosting electricity demand.
"The report wasn't just noisy and full of gaps, it provided a downwardly biased perspective of inflation," said Gregory Daco, chief economist at EY-Parthenon. "The downward bias stemmed from the carry-forward methodology that assumed an unchanged price index in October for all surveyed data – imparting a downward bias to inflation dynamics."
Source: Reuters