WASHINGTON: US President Donald Trump on Monday said he was nominating economist E.J. Antoni as the new Bureau of Labour Statistics commissioner, ten days after firing the statistics agency’s previous leader after a weak scorecard of the US job market, accusing her without evidence of manipulating the figures.
Antoni is currently the chief economist at the influential US conservative think tank Heritage Foundation.
“Our Economy is booming, and E.J. will ensure that the Numbers released are HONEST and ACCURATE,” Trump said on Truth Social.
Antoni, who must be confirmed by the Senate, takes over an agency that had a staff of 2,300 as of September 2024 and that has come under heightened scrutiny for the eroding quality of the data it produces. Its monthly figures about the state of the US job market and inflation are consumed by a global audience of economists, investors, business leaders, public policymakers and consumers, and their release routinely has a visible and real-time effect on stock, bond and currency markets around the world.
Trump added to growing concerns about the reliability of BLS and other federal government economic data when he fired Erika McEntarfer as BLS commissioner on Aug 1. Her dismissal came hours after the agency reported much weaker-than-expected US job growth for July and issued an historically large revision to its employment figures for May and June, reducing the estimated number of jobs created in the two months by nearly 260,000.
In announcing her firing, Trump accused McEntarfer – appointed to the role by former president Joe Biden – of manipulating the employment data for political purposes. There is no evidence of that being true.
He promised he would replace her “with someone much more competent and qualified”.
Antoni, who holds a doctoral degree in economics, was previously an economist at the Texas Public Policy Foundation and has taught courses on labour economics, money and banking, according to the Heritage Foundation.
He must now address the difficulties BLS has had with declining survey response rates and with data collection problems in other critical statistical series, such as for inflation.
The nonfarm payrolls report provides a monthly snapshot of the US job market, offering scores of figures including how many jobs were created, what the unemployment rate was, how many people joined or left the labour force and what workers earn per hour and how many hours they work in a week.
Its headline estimates for job creation are revised twice after their initial release to account for the submission of additional survey responses from employers and updates to the seasonal factors that underly the statistics. They are also subject to an annual benchmark revision process.
The monthly Consumer Price Index and Producer Price Index together historically have provided a comprehensive picture of US inflation, including hundreds of data points depicting the changes in cost for everything from eggs to auto insurance, figures relied upon heavily by policymakers like those at the Federal Reserve. CPI is used to set the annual cost-of-living-adjustment for retirees receiving Social Security payments.
Earlier this year, though, BLS said a staffing shortage was forcing it to reduce the CPI index collection sample after closing operations in Buffalo, New York; Lincoln, Nebraska; and Provo, Utah. The percentage of prices that are imputed rather than gathered has more than tripled this year to 35%.
Starting this month, BLS is ending the calculation and publication of about 350 components of PPI, a key measure of inflation at the wholesale level.
BLS, like other government agencies, has faced a hiring freeze imposed by Trump on his return to the White House in January and likely will see a wave of departures at the end of the summer as staff who opted into a deferred resignation program formally leave government employment.
A Reuters poll last month of 100 economists and policy experts found the vast majority had at least some concern about the eroding quality of US economic statistics.
“I can’t help but worry some deadlines are going to be missed and undetected biases or other errors are going to start creeping into some of these reports just because of the reduction in staff,” Erica Groshen, who served as BLS commissioner from 2013 to 2017 during president Barack Obama’s second term and the first months of Trump’s first term, told Reuters as part of the poll.
Keith Hall, appointed BLS commissioner by president George W. Bush in 2008, told Reuters in a recent interview the agency has seen little to no budget growth for a decade, even as the costs for data collection have risen.
