White HousePresident Donald Trump’s nominee to lead the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) has proposed ending releasing the agency’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 published online on Tuesday.
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 the interview was published, 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 said in the Fox interview, which was conducted before Trump named him to lead the BLS.
“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.
White House spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt said on Tuesday that it was “the plan and the hope” that the BLS would continue publishing monthly jobs reports, but repeated criticism of the agency’s statistics.
“We need to look at the means and the methods of how the BLS is acquiring this very important data,” she said. “The goal of course is to provide honest and good data for the American people.”
The fight over the BLS comes at a time of heightened debate over the US economy and to what extent significant new tariffs will drive up prices for businesses and consumers and slow growth.
The most recent reports from the BLS showed jobs growth declining and prices continuing to rise, although at the same pace as last month.
Private companies also conduct surveys to gauge inflation and hiring but they are seen as less reliable than the government data.
The Trump administration has taken other steps to reduce longstanding – and sometimes basic – government functions.
His education secretary, Linda McMahon, has pledged to dismantle the department she leads, while Lee Zeldin, head of of the Environmental Protection Agency, has refocused his agency’s mission on deregulation, recently announcing a plan to scrap a landmark finding that greenhouse gases are harmful to the environment.