The Absence of October's Job Report Shows Why Native American Communities Need Better Data

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By Robert Maxim and Steven Estrada

December 01, 2025

Guest Opinion. On November 19, the Bureau of Labor Statistics announced that, as a result of the government shutdown, it would not release its October jobs report—the first time in the report’s 77-year history that it would not be published. As a result, businesses, state and local governments, and the Federal Reserve (which will decide this month whether to adjust interest rates) are now left without a clear view of the nation’s economic situation.

While this is uncharted territory for the U.S. as a whole, it’s a familiar challenge to Native Americans, whose resources and supports have long been undercut by inaccurate and obsolete data. For example, Native Americans have never been included in the monthly jobs report, and it was only in 2022 that the federal government began publishing any monthly jobs data at all about Native people.

This lack of data has grave impacts on Tribal governance. Many Americans falsely view Native Americans as just a racial group, when in fact Tribes are sovereign nations that govern their lands and enroll Tribal citizens. However, to do so, Tribal governments and federal agencies rely on data that would be considered inadequate for nearly any other group in the United States.

A recent report by the Brookings Institution and the Southern California Association of Governments, co-authored by a writer of this piece, identifies five data challenges that Tribes in Southern California face: insufficient sample sizes, remote Tribal geographies that make data collection difficult, continued misunderstandings of Native American identity, datasets that are designed without Tribal input, and data about Native Americans that remain inaccessible to Tribes.

To provide an example of the data quality challenges that Tribes must contend with, compare the population of Native Americans across three of the most widely used federal datasets: the decennial census, the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey one-year estimates, and the American Community Survey five-year estimates. The U.S. population varies by just 1% across the latest versions of these three datasets. The Native American population, however, varies by over 24%—a difference of 2.3 million people.

These shortcomings don’t just matter for record-keeping purposes—they cut to the core of Tribal governance and the well-being of Native Americans. While other levels of government rely on tax revenue to fund government operations, tax collection is limited and complicated for most Tribes. Many Tribes have relatively small populations and a significant number of low-income citizens, and are also working to maintain competitiveness with off-reservation communities. As a result, typically only Tribes that operate commercial businesses are able to collect tax revenue of any sort. Because of this, federal, state, and other grant-based funding flows account for a significant portion of Tribal government budgets. Since access to many grants is based on Census Bureau and other federal data, inaccurate or outdated data can substantially affect the level of resources available for essential Tribal programs supporting education, employment, health, housing, and other needs.

As one particularly egregious example, the Tribal Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program, which provides cash assistance and other supports to low-income Native American families with children, bases its annual funding allocations on data from 1994. In other words, the program designed to serve some of the most vulnerable Tribal citizens uses data that is over 30 years old, effectively ignoring demographic changes within Tribes over the past generation.

Moreover, since the start of 2025, the federal government has removed a growing number of federal datasets and research reports from the public domain. Much of this lost content has focused topics of interest to Native American communities, such as demographic information on minority groups, public health statistics, and research on Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women.

With the federal government no longer serving as a reliable data partner for Tribes, other levels of government—including states, regions, and localities—must step up to fill the gap. There are a variety of steps that these government entities can take to support Tribal data.

To start, state, regional, and local governments should create Indigenous data strategies to help non-Native government entities work with Tribes to produce, store, and use data in support of Tribal governance. Next, state legislatures and regional and local governmental organizations can invest in Tribal data capacity, including by providing funding to Tribes to develop in-house data capabilities and creating data-focused career pathways such as internships for Native and non-Native youth.

Third, state, regional, and local agencies can take steps to support Tribal sovereignty and self-determination around data. This could include allowing Tribes to self-certify data to access grants and giving agencies more flexibility to waive data-related grant requirements for Tribes. It could also include increasing Tribes’ access to data that public agencies hold about their lands and citizens. Finally states, regions, and localities should work to make government data more accurate and relevant to Tribes and Native American people, and increase the representation of Native Americans in agencies that engage in data work.

By taking these steps, government agencies can strengthen data integrity for Native and non-Native people alike, and support economic well-being for their citizens of all backgrounds.

Robert Maxim is a citizen of the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe and a fellow at Brookings Metro. He is an author of the report Good data, stronger Tribes: Overcoming Native American data challenges in Southern California.

Steven Estrada is the chairman of the Santa Rosa Band of Cahuilla Indians and the tribal executive officer of the Soboba Band of Luiseño Indians.