It’s not the case that government IT is invariably bad—the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis has an amazing interface (FRED) and API for working with their data. Unfortunately, not all government statistics are available here, especially some of the more interesting BLS series.

The essential problem with BLS is that all of their work products—reports, tables etc.—are designed to be printed out, not accessed electronically. Many BLS tables are embedded in PDFs, which makes the data they contain essentially impossible to extract; non-PDF, text-based tables, which are better, are difficult to parse electronically: structure is conveyed by tabs and white space, column headings are split over multiple lines with no separators; heading lengths vary etc.

Why does it matter? For one, when users can access data electronically, via an API, they can combine it with other sources, look for patterns, test hypotheses, find bugs / measurement errors, create visualization and do all sorts of other things that make the data more useful.

BLS does offer a GUI tool for downloading data, but it’s kludgy, requires a Java Applet, requires series to be hand-selected and then returns an Excel(!) spreadsheet w/ extraneous headers and formatting. Furthermore, it’s not clear what series and what transformations are needed from GUI-data to make the more refined, aggregated tables.