Trump’s BLS nominee floats ending monthly jobs report

President Donald Trump’s nominee to lead the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) has proposed ending releasing the aency’s closely watched jobs report each month.

Conservative economist EJ Antoni, a longtime critic of the bureau, floated the idea in an interview with Fox News on Monday, the same day that Trump officially announced him as his pick to lead the BLS.

The idea raised new alarm over the agency’s future and the reliability of its statistics, which are used by political leaders, investors and everyday Americans to get a sense of how the world’s richest country is faring.

Trump fired its former leader this month after the agency reported a sharp slowdown in jobs growth.

Trump accused the commissioner, Erika McEntarfer, of having “rigged” the numbers – a claim that was widely rejected by economists.

They likewise panned his pick of Antoni, saying his economic commentary was rife with basic mistakes.

After Fox published its interview online on Tuesday, an economist who has advised Republicans in the past posted: “Senators who vote to confirm Antoni are voting to essentially eviscerate the BLS and its jobs data.”

“The articles and tweets I’ve seen him publish are probably the most error-filled of any think tank economist right now,” Jessica Riedl, a senior fellow at another conservative think tank, the Manhattan Institute, also wrote on social media.

Antoni, a federal budget analyst at the Heritage Foundation, is a longtime critic of the BLS. He has called its statistics “phoney baloney” and last year urged the Department of Government Efficiency (Doge) “to take a chainsaw to the BLS”.

In the Fox interview, he said the jobs report, which includes the country’s unemployment rate, the number of jobs created over the last month, and other data, was unreliable.

“It’s a serious problem that needs to be fixed immediately,” Antoni told FOX Business.

“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 added.