Trump BLS nominee floats ending key jobs report

WASHINGTON, DC - AUGUST 07: U.S. President Donald Trump holds a poster which reads "Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) Overestimates Biden Jobs by Nearly 1.5 Million" in the Oval Office on August 07, 2025 in Washington, DC. Trump fired Bureau of Labor Statistics Commissioner Dr. Erika McEntarfer on August 1st, claiming the agency issued “phony” jobs numbers during the Biden administration to aid Democrats. — Trump recently fired Bureau of Labor Statistics Commissioner Dr. Erika McEntarfer, claiming the agency issued 'phony' jobs numbers during the Biden administration to aid Democrats

(Image credit: Win McNamee / Getty Images)

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.

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.

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Rafi Schwartz has worked as a politics writer at The Week since 2022, where he covers elections, Congress and the White House. He was previously a contributing writer with Mic focusing largely on politics, a senior writer with Splinter News, a staff writer for Fusion's news lab, and the managing editor of Heeb Magazine, a Jewish life and culture publication. Rafi's work has appeared in Rolling Stone, GOOD and The Forward, among others.