SFGate -- Shooting the messenger: Report on layoffs killed

The Bush administration, under fire for its handling of the economy, has quietly killed off a Labor Department program that tracked mass layoffs by U.S. companies.

The statistic, which had been issued monthly and was closely watched by hard-hit Silicon Valley, served as a pulse reading of corporate America's financial health.

The first President Bush canceled the Mass-Layoffs Statistics program amid election-year charges that he had bungled handling of the economy.
The program was resuscitated two years later by the Clinton administration.

Now Bush the younger is following in his father's footsteps, once again deciding that the American people have no real need to know how many mass layoffs are made each month.