President Trump's nominee to lead the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) suggested the agency should stop issuing monthly jobs reports, claiming that the data the agency uses to calculate them is not reliable.
E.J. Antoni, whom Trump nominated Monday to lead BLS, said the agency should "suspend issuing the monthly jobs reports, but keep publishing more accurate, though less timely, quarterly data."
"Major decisionmakers from Wall Street to D.C. rely on these numbers, and a lack of confidence in the data has far-reaching consequences," the nominee told Fox Business.
Trump nominated Antoni, the chief economist at the far-right Heritage Foundation think tank, to lead BLS after the president fired the agency's previous chief, Erika McEntarfer, after the release of the dismal July jobs report.
The report showed not only meager job growth last month but also steep downward revisions to the May and June employment reports. On net, the report showed the U.S. adding roughly 100,000 jobs over the past three months — barely a third of what economists deem necessary to prevent unemployment from rising.
Trump fired McEntarfer the same day, accusing her and the agency of manipulating jobs data to make Republicans look bad and hide Democratic mismanagement of the economy.
The president has provided no evidence to support his claim, and BLS veterans from both parties have said that manipulating employment data for political purposes is nearly impossible based on the way the agency calculates it.
BLS also frequently makes revisions to employment and inflation reports based on data compiled and received after the reports have already been released.
While most economists attribute the scale of recent BLS revisions to post-COVID-19 pandemic issues with data collection and survey response times, Antoni is among a handful pro-Trump economists who've accused BLS of massaging data to protect Democrats and harm Republicans.
"For four years, the Biden administration and its sycophants in the media kept telling Americans that we had the strongest economy in history," Antoni wrote in a May op-ed published by Townhall, claiming the Labor Department "admitted" that thousands of jobs added during the prior administration "were fake."
"The financial pain of families was ignored while misleading (and often inaccurate) statistics were paraded on the news to convince Americans not to believe their lying eyes or empty wallets," he added at the time.
Antoni, who contributed to the Project 2025 blueprint for Trump's second term, is expected to be easily confirmed by the Senate, where he'll only need a majority of votes from the GOP-controlled upper chamber.
But his actions at BLS could cast a shadow over the agency's influential reports on employment and inflation — especially if he makes major changes to the frequency or compilation of those reports.
Economists across the ideological spectrum have accused Antoni of making misleading and inaccurate claims about the economy to support Trump's policies and criticize Democrats.
"EJ Antoni's commentary on labor statistics has unfortunately been quite poor," Alan Cole, a senior economist at the conservative Tax Foundation, wrote on the social platform X. "I do not think it's anywhere near the capability or knowledge of e.g. Keith Hall or William Beach, both excellent Republican appointees, the latter of whom was appointed by Trump in his first term."
Kyle Pomerleau, senior fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, said on social media, "There are a lot of competent conservative economists that could do this job. E.J. is not one of them."
Source: The Hill - News
