Trump BLS Nominee Suggests Nixing Monthly Jobs Report

WASHINGTON ― President Donald Trump’s nominee to head the Bureau of Labor Statistics suggested getting rid of the agency’s closely watched monthly jobs estimate after the most recent estimate angered the president.

In an interview with Fox News Digital conducted last week and published Tuesday, Heritage Foundation chief economist E.J. Antoni claimed the numbers are unreliable.

“Until it is corrected, the BLS should suspend issuing the monthly job reports but keep publishing the more accurate, though less timely, quarterly data,” Antoni said. “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.”

Trump fired the previous head of the BLS, Erika McEntarfer, after an unfavorable employment situation report for the month of July, which included downward revisions to estimates for May and June.

Trump said the numbers were “rigged” to hurt him politically, a claim for which the White House has come up with absolutely no evidence whatsoever. In his announcement Monday that Antoni would be his nominee to replace McEntarfer, Trump said, “E.J. will ensure that the Numbers released are HONEST and ACCURATE.”

Asked about the idea during a briefing on Tuesday, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said the reports would continue.

“That’s the hope, and that these monthly reports will be data that the American people can trust,” Leavitt said.

Erica Groshen, a Cornell University economist who served as BLS commissioner from 2013 to 2017, said it would be a mistake for the agency not to provide its customary two months of preliminary estimates of job growth, even though the numbers always get revised twice. Research has suggested the monthly employment report is the government’s most closely scrutinized economic indicator among financial asset traders, as the jobs data offers a broad snapshot of the overall economy.

“We would be depriving financial markets, monetary policy, international markets of all sorts with this critical information for understanding the trends and the stage of the business cycle,” Groshen told HuffPost. “If the markets and people felt that that [the twice-revised final estimate] was the only reliable set of information in the report, then they probably would have been ignoring it for two months.”

Instead of amplifying Trump’s conspiracy theory about rigged numbers, Antoni told Fox News Digital the BLS surveys of businesses are unreliable due to lower response rates since the coronavirus pandemic.

“The fact that you consistently have large downward revisions means that there are other things wrong with your models and methodologies. Statistical assumptions that may have worked fine before COVID no longer work in today’s economy and therefore need to be revised,” he said.

The monthly job reports always include revisions to prior months’ data as more survey responses come in. Revisions can be both positive or negative, but have been negative each month of 2025. Economists say revisions can become larger in times of economic change, such as before a recession, which some have warned could happen as a result of Trump’s tariff policy.

The monthly jobs numbers are compiled from surveys of more than 100,000 businesses and government agencies. It’s a key measure of the economy’s health, and also the gold standard in terms of real-time economic research. Suspending the report will likely not inspire confidence.

But it’s obvious who might benefit from suspending the data, at least if it’s bad: Trump.

Stan Veuger, a senior economist with the conservative American Enterprise Institute, said it’s clear Antoni’s job would be to flatter the president. Cooking the books at BLS would be a tricky task, however, considering how many people are involved in collecting and collating the data.

“It’s difficult for him to go in there and just put out different numbers that are fake,” Veuger told HuffPost. “But I guess if you don’t put out any numbers, you won’t infuriate Trump.”

Veuger is one of many right-leaning policy experts who criticized Antoni’s nomination even before hearing of his proposal to shut down the jobs numbers. The critics have pointed to overt partisanship and hack analyses, such as an October 2024 paper that dubiously claimed the U.S. had been in a recession for two years, according to an apparent misinterpretation of data.

Antoni would have to be confirmed by the U.S. Senate before he can start at his new job, but there’s not much reason to expect resistance from Republican senators. After all, they’ve put Fox News hosts in all manner of key administration positions, and Antoni is at least an economist.

Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.), chair of the Senate committee that will first consider Antoni’s nomination, echoed Antoni’s claims that the BLS numbers are unreliable.

“BLS’s years-long failure to produce reliable data ― especially when that data has broad market-moving implications ― is unacceptable,” Cassidy said in a statement to HuffPost. “We need a BLS Commissioner committed to producing accurate, unbiased economic information to the American people.”

For the most part, Republicans have been quiet about the president’s authoritarian push for more beneficial statistics.

“Installing a crank economist to only publish favorable or distorted data on the economy,” Sen. Tina Smith (D-Minn.) said on social media. “Textbook authoritarianism – mum from my GOP colleagues.”

Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.), the top Democrat on Cassidy’s committee, said in a press release that a vote for Antoni is a vote to shred the credibility of the government’s stats.

“If E.J. Antoni gets confirmed, I hope Republicans like playing make-believe, because that’s all BLS data will become,” Murray said.

Igor Bobic contributed reporting.

CORRECTION: This article has been amended to reflect that Fox News Digital conducted the interview with Antoni.