After President Trump nominated E.J. Antoni, an economist at the Heritage Foundation, to lead the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the White House told RealClearPolitics Tuesday that it is the “plan” and “hope” of the administration to continue to release monthly job reports.
A barometer for growth, few numbers are as fraught in presidential politics.
A good jobs report can buoy an administration. A dismal one can bring headwinds and invite questions about a presidents economic agenda. For his part, Antoni suggested that the agency he is slated to lead should suspend the monthly jobs report, alleging that it has previously been unreliable and inaccurate.
“Until it is corrected, the BLS should suspend issuing the monthly job reports but keep publishing the more accurate, though less timely, quarterly data,” he told Fox Business in an interview that came before his nomination. “Major decision-makers from Wall Street to D.C. rely on these numbers, and a lack of confidence in the data has far-reaching consequences.”
The White House described those remarks as merely a suggestion. “I think he floated the idea of possibly suspending until they can get the data and the methodology in order,” Trump spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt said Tuesday. But an overhaul of the bureau is coming. “We need to restore new leadership that we can trust,” Leavitt told RCP, citing a previous “decline in the quality and the reliability of data.”
Moving forward, the administration will evaluate “the means and methods,” she added, of “acquiring this very important data.”
A frequent presence online, Antoni said last week that methodology should be overhauled. “There are better ways to collect, process, and disseminate data,” he wrote on X, “that is the task for the next B.L.S. commissioner, and only consistent delivery of accurate data in a timely manner will rebuild the trust that has been lost over the last several years.”
Antoni did not return calls and texts from RCP requesting comment. His nomination is now pending before the Senate.
While the bureau sits under the umbrella of the Department of Labor, it has largely operated independently. President Trump, however, has not just quibbled with the results of the economic scorecard but removed the economist creating it.
He fired the previous commissioner, Erika McEntarfer, after the agency revised downward the number of jobs created in May and June by more than a quarter million.
The White House had pointed to that data before the revision as another sign of robust growth. The changes that painted the economy in a darker light, the president suggested, were “manipulated for political purposes.”
Trump is not the first president bedeviled by the bureau. McEntarfer threw the Biden administration for a loop by initially reporting robust growth in March of 2024, an election year, only to later revise those numbers later that summer downward by almost one million. While Republicans happily took up the revision as evidence of Bidens economic failures, the GOP-led House Budget Committee noted that the 30% revision was “five times” the bureaus “average margin of error.”
Economists in both the public and private sectors rely on the data from the bureau. The Federal Reserve looks to the jobs report as it sets interest rates. Wall Street makes investments guided by what the numbers reflect about the health of the economy.
“Good data helps not just the Fed, it helps the government, but it also helps the private sector,” Jerome Powell, the Fed chair, said at a recent news conference. “The United States has been a leader in that for 100 years,” added the bureaucrat who has himself drawn Trumps ire, “and we really need to continue that in my view.”
Critics of the current White House say that the presidents recent hiring and firing open the door to speculation that his administration is cooking the books for partisan gain.
“If the poverty numbers come in and look great, is the director of the Census going to get a raise?” Amy OHara, a former Census Bureau official who is now a professor at Georgetown University, asked the New York Times. “If the household income numbers dont look great what happens then? What about G.D.P.? What about C.P.I.?”
Kevin Roberts, president of the conservative Heritage Foundation and prominent Trump ally, heralded E.J. Antoni as “one of the sharpest economic minds in the nation” and “a fearless truth teller who grasps that sound economics must serve the interest of American families, not globalist elites.”
In addition to the jobs report, the bureau also produces the Consumer Price Index, a key barometer of inflation. The White House has recently been thrilled by those numbers, with inflation largely holding steady despite Trumps tariffs and the dour predictions of many economists.
Asked how the public can trust inflation numbers from the BLS if that agency botched the jobs report, Leavitt replied that the administration wants “to ensure that all of the data – the inflation data, the jobs data, any data point that is coming out of the BLS – is trustworthy and accurate, which is why the president has restored new leadership.”
Philip Wegmann is White House correspondent for RealClearPolitics.
