Donald Trump has claimed that food inflation is being systematically underreported and that the government’s official inflation metrics don’t reflect what Americans actually experience at grocery stores. There’s a kernel of truth here—but not in the way Trump suggests. The data shows that food prices have indeed surged dramatically: grocery bills climbed approximately 49% since 2020, and between January and September 2025 alone, food prices at grocery stores rose 1.4%, with year-over-year increases hitting 2.7% from September 2024 to September 2025. However, the real problem with CPI food inflation reporting isn’t that it’s understating prices—it’s that the government’s ability to accurately measure those prices has been severely compromised by staffing shortages that directly resulted from hiring freezes implemented under the Trump administration. The Consumer Price Index (CPI), calculated monthly by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, is meant to track the prices Americans pay for goods and services.
It does this by having government employees visit thousands of stores across the country, documenting price changes for specific items. That sounds straightforward, but the process depends on sufficient federal workforce. Recent reporting reveals that the Labor Department has scaled back the price checks used to calculate CPI due to staffing shortages, with the federal government even suspending price checks entirely in some cities due to insufficient workforce. The irony is sharp: claims that inflation data is inaccurate are being made in an environment where the government’s ability to collect accurate data has been directly weakened. The stakes of this measurement problem are significant. When inflation data is compromised, it affects everything from Social Security cost-of-living adjustments to Federal Reserve interest rate decisions. For consumers trying to understand whether their groceries really do cost more, the answer is yes—but the larger question is whether the official numbers capturing that reality are trustworthy at all.
Table of Contents
- What Exactly Is the CPI and How Does the Labor Department Actually Calculate It?
- The Scale of Food Price Increases: What the Current Data Actually Shows
- How Staffing Shortages Have Undermined Price Collection for CPI
- What Do the Staffing Cuts Actually Mean for Your Grocery Bill Data?
- The Direction Problem: Could CPI Be Overstated or Understated?
- Historical Context: Food Price Inflation Since 2020
- What Comes Next: CPI Reliability and Inflation Measurement Going Forward
- Conclusion
What Exactly Is the CPI and How Does the Labor Department Actually Calculate It?
The Consumer Price Index is essentially a monthly report card on inflation, calculated by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), a division of the Department of Labor. To arrive at the CPI figure, the BLS doesn’t estimate or model inflation—it employs actual people to conduct price observations. These employees are sent out to grocery stores, gas stations, pharmacies, and retail locations to record what specific items cost. For example, they might check the price of a dozen eggs at the same Kroger in Kentucky month after month, documenting every change. The CPI is constructed from thousands of these individual price points, collected from stores in hundreds of cities across all 50 states. The calculation is weighted: food gets a certain percentage of the overall CPI basket, housing gets another, transportation another, and so on.
Within food, the BLS distinguishes between food at home (groceries) and food away from home (restaurants). The grocery prices that trump references when discussing food inflation come from the “food at home” category, which is meant to capture the actual out-of-pocket costs Americans experience when they visit the supermarket. When the BLS reports that grocery prices rose 2.7% year-over-year through September 2025, that’s based on thousands of individual price observations conducted by government employees visiting stores. Or at least, it’s supposed to be. The problem emerges when you ask: has the BLS been collecting a sufficient number of those observations? The answer, according to recent reporting from NPR and confirmed by Labor Department staffing documents, is no. The agency has systematically reduced the number of price checks it conducts due to staffing shortages directly caused by hiring freezes implemented under the Trump administration.
The Scale of Food Price Increases: What the Current Data Actually Shows
Before examining whether CPI measurements are reliable, it’s important to establish what the data actually says about food prices—and Trump isn’t entirely wrong about the magnitude. Grocery bills have increased substantially, climbing approximately 49% since 2020. To put that in concrete terms: a shopping cart that cost $100 in January 2020 would cost roughly $149 by early 2025. For a family of four spending $200 per week on groceries in 2020, that same shopping basket cost nearly $300 by 2025. That’s a devastating change for households already stretched financially, and it’s real, measurable, and reflected in the CPI data. The more recent data is similarly stark.
Between January and September 2025, food prices at grocery stores rose 1.4%, and when comparing September 2024 to September 2025, the year-over-year increase was 2.7%. These aren’t trivial numbers—2.7% annual food inflation is meaningful, particularly when wages for many workers haven’t kept pace. This validates what millions of Americans report in surveys: grocery shopping is noticeably more expensive than it was a few years ago. The limitation here is that CPI, while tracking real price increases, measures price changes month-to-month and year-to-year, but doesn’t directly address the absolute affordability crisis created by the cumulative 49% increase since 2020. The key distinction, however, is between “food prices are up” (which is true) and “CPI is underreporting food price increases” (which is a different claim). The CBS News fact-check that examined Trump’s affordability claims found that the CPI data on food price increases is not dramatically understating the real-world experience. What’s concerning isn’t that the numbers are fudged lower—it’s that the data collection process itself has been compromised, making those numbers potentially unreliable in either direction.
How Staffing Shortages Have Undermined Price Collection for CPI
The mechanics of how government staffing shortages affect CPI are straightforward but consequential. The Labor Department relies on a field staff of employees who conduct in-person price observations at retail locations. When the Trump administration implemented hiring freezes and staffing cuts across federal agencies, the Labor Department’s price collection capacity contracted. According to NPR’s reporting from June 2025, the federal government has suspended price checks entirely in some cities due to insufficient workforce. This isn’t a minor reduction at the margins—it’s the outright elimination of data collection in certain geographic areas. What makes this particularly troubling is that CPI is a foundational economic indicator. The Federal Reserve uses CPI data to make decisions about interest rates. Congress uses it to adjust social security benefits and other inflation-indexed programs.
Private businesses use it to set wages and prices. When the data collection process is weakened, every decision made downstream becomes potentially compromised. The Labor Department itself hasn’t disputed the reporting about staffing shortages; instead, the agency has attempted to compensate by using statistical models and seasonal adjustments to fill gaps left by missing price observations. But statistical models are not the same as actual prices observed in actual stores. A concrete example of the problem: imagine the BLS normally collected price data for 500 products across 10 grocery stores in Cleveland. If staffing shortages force them to cut that down to data from only 6 stores, they’re now extrapolating from fewer observations. If those 6 stores happen to be in wealthier neighborhoods where price increases were smaller, the overall CPI calculation for Cleveland might understate food inflation in the city. Conversely, if the remaining stores are in areas hit harder by price hikes, CPI could overstate inflation. Economists have warned that the errors could go either direction—the CPI could be too high or too low—which creates uncertainty about the actual accuracy of the reported figures.
What Do the Staffing Cuts Actually Mean for Your Grocery Bill Data?
The hiring freeze impact is direct and measurable. The Trump administration’s hiring freeze, documented in executive orders and agency directives, explicitly affected federal agencies including the Department of Labor. When agency budgets remain flat and hiring is frozen, positions go unfilled. Retirements aren’t replaced. New data collection initiatives are postponed. The Labor Department’s price observation corps shrank as a result, and the agency’s capacity to conduct comprehensive price checks declined correspondingly. This happened in real time during the first half of 2025, exactly when food prices were rising and inflation monitoring was most critical. Practical consequences include reduced frequency of price checks in some locations, gaps in data collection for certain product categories, and increased reliance on statistical imputation to fill missing data points.
When the Labor Department reports that food prices rose 2.7% year-over-year through September 2025, that number is based on a smaller sample of actual observations than would have been collected under normal staffing levels. It’s not necessarily false—the grocery prices are still climbing—but the margin of error around that estimate is larger. This creates a paradox: the government is forced to provide inflation data that policymakers and the public rely on, but that data is less reliable than it should be. For consumers, the practical implication is that the official CPI numbers on food should be treated as indicative rather than definitive. The 2.7% figure is real, but the confidence interval around it is wider than ideal. Your own experience at the grocery store—paying more for the same items month after month—is direct data. The CPI is an aggregate statistical estimate. When you combine a 49% cumulative increase since 2020 with mounting evidence that data collection capacity has been compromised, the reasonable conclusion is that food inflation is real, food affordability is a genuine crisis, but official inflation metrics may not be capturing the full picture due to capacity constraints.
The Direction Problem: Could CPI Be Overstated or Understated?
Here’s where the staffing shortage problem becomes genuinely troubling for policymakers: economists cannot reliably predict the direction of the measurement error. When price observations are reduced, the resulting CPI could theoretically be either too high or too low. According to NPR’s reporting, economists explicitly warned that staffing shortages could produce either inflated or understated CPI figures. This uncertainty is worse than a known bias in one direction. If CPI is overstated (meaning inflation is reported as higher than it actually is), then the Federal Reserve might raise interest rates more aggressively than warranted, potentially triggering unnecessary economic slowdown and job losses. If CPI is understated (meaning inflation is reported as lower than it actually is), then the Federal Reserve might not raise rates enough, allowing inflation to run hotter and eroding purchasing power further.
Either way, policy decisions made in response to unreliable data can have massive downstream consequences for employment, borrowing costs, and investment. Social Security adjustments are tied to CPI; if CPI is miscalculated, beneficiaries either get raises they don’t deserve or miss out on increases they do deserve. A limitation of the current situation is that there’s no straightforward way to validate CPI against ground truth without conducting a parallel, fully-staffed price observation effort—which the Labor Department can’t afford to do given its constraints. Instead, the agency attempts to validate CPI against other data sources, like retail scanner data from large chains. But scanner data doesn’t cover all stores, all products, or all geographies equally. For a smaller community in rural Mississippi, the Labor Department’s field observers might be the only source of inflation data. When those observers are pulled or furloughed, that community disappears from the inflation statistics entirely.
Historical Context: Food Price Inflation Since 2020
The 49% increase in grocery bills since January 2020 didn’t happen in a straight line, and understanding the timeline provides useful context. The initial spike occurred in 2021-2022, driven by pandemic-related supply chain disruptions, labor shortages in food production and logistics, and increased transportation costs. A gallon of milk, a dozen eggs, and a loaf of bread all climbed in price during that period, and the cumulative effect was substantial. But food prices have continued to rise even as pandemic-era supply chain disruptions eased, suggesting that the underlying cost structure of food production—labor, energy, grain inputs, fertilizer—has reset at a higher level.
From 2023 onward, food price inflation moderated relative to the 2021-2022 spike but never reversed. Between January and September 2025, the 1.4% increase reflects a slower pace of food inflation compared to the crisis years, but prices are still climbing. This suggests that whatever has driven food costs higher—whether inflation in agricultural inputs, market consolidation among food producers, labor costs, or all of the above—remains structural rather than temporary. A consumer buying groceries today is unlikely to see prices fall back to 2020 levels; instead, the question is whether inflation continues at a manageable pace or reignites.
What Comes Next: CPI Reliability and Inflation Measurement Going Forward
As the federal government continues operating under budget constraints and hiring limitations, the question of CPI reliability will persist. The Labor Department faces a choice: either secure additional resources to rebuild its price observation capacity, or continue operating with reduced data collection and acknowledge the limitations of the resulting statistics. Neither option is without cost. Additional resources mean increased spending at a time when the administration has emphasized fiscal constraint.
Acknowledging limitations means admitting that official inflation data is less reliable than the public assumes, which could undermine confidence in government statistics more broadly. The longer-term outlook depends on whether staffing decisions change. If hiring freezes are lifted and the Labor Department is allowed to rebuild its field staff, CPI data quality can improve. If staffing constraints persist or tighten further, the Labor Department will need to develop better statistical methods for imputing missing data—a challenging task when the missing data points are concentrated in certain geographic regions or product categories, which would create systematic bias. Either way, consumers should be aware that the official CPI figures, while the best data available, may not perfectly capture their actual experience with food price inflation, particularly in communities where price collection capacity has been most constrained.
Conclusion
Trump’s claim that food inflation is underreported contains a grain of truth obscured by a larger irony. Food prices have indeed surged—a 49% increase since 2020 with recent year-over-year increases of 2.7%—and these real increases deserve serious attention and policy response. But the underreporting concern isn’t that the Labor Department is deliberately understating food prices; it’s that the government’s capacity to accurately measure food prices has been compromised by staffing shortages directly caused by hiring freezes. The CPI figures on food are based on fewer price observations than they should be, creating genuine uncertainty about whether the reported numbers are reliable. Consumers experiencing sticker shock at the grocery store aren’t imagining things—the data confirms their reality.
But the data itself should be treated with caution until the Labor Department’s price observation capacity is restored. The path forward requires acknowledging both parts of the problem: food inflation is real and substantial, affecting millions of household budgets, and the official measurement of that inflation has become less reliable due to government workforce constraints. Policymakers, the Federal Reserve, Congress, and the public should all factor this measurement uncertainty into how they interpret CPI reports and make decisions based on them. For consumers, the practical implication is clear: your experience at the grocery store is valid data. The official CPI tells part of the story, but it’s increasingly an incomplete picture.