What happened
E.J. Antoni, the conservative economist President Donald Trump named Monday as his pick to lead the nonpartisan Bureau of Labor Statistics, suggested scrapping the BLS's closely watched monthly jobs report in an Aug. 4 interview with Fox News Digital published Tuesday.
Who said what
Until its "fundamentally flawed" data collection methodologies are "corrected, the BLS should suspend issuing the monthly job reports but keep publishing the more accurate, though less timely, quarterly data," Antoni told Fox News Digital. Halting the monthly report would deprive "businesses and policymakers" of the "data they've used for decades to gauge the state of the labor market and broader economy," The Washington Post said.
Many economists "share, to some degree, Antoni's concerns" about the government's jobs data, due largely to "trends such as declining response rates to its surveys," The Associated Press said. But economists "from across the political spectrum" said an inexperienced "conservative ideologue" was the wrong person to tackle the issue. Antoni has "nothing in his writing or his résumé to suggest that he's qualified for the position, besides that he is always manipulating the data to favor Trump in some way," said Brian Albrecht, the chief economist at the International Center for Law and Economics.
What next?
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt Tuesday called Antoni an "economic expert" who had earned Trump's trust, but said she believed "the plan" and "the hope" was for the BLS to continue releasing the monthly jobs numbers.
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