Dive Brief:

• The U.S. Commerce Department says it cannot be ready before Dec. 18 with monthly data on housing starts for September and October — data it was to have published Tuesday after being postponed from Nov. 19.
• The agency says that the government shutdown in the first half of last month, when the fiscal year began without any spending authorization, badly messed up its data-collection activity.
• On the upside, however, the Commerce Department said it will be ready Tuesday with information on the annual rate at which builders pulled construction permits in the two months.

Dive Insight:

Commerce may win the prize for biggest problem caused by the government shutdown. The information on housing starts in September was scheduled for Oct. 17 before Washington went into a tailspin. Federal offices opened one day before that, and it's been hung up since. What Commerce offered was, "The lapse in federal funding affected the data collection schedule for the Survey of Construction, the source of data on new housing units started and completed."