Trump’s BLS nominee buoy ends monthly work report

President Donald Trump’s nominee leads the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) to propose ending the agency’s monthly close-kick work report.

Conservative economist EJ Antoni, a longtime critic of the bureau, proposed the idea in an interview with Fox News online released on Tuesday.

The idea raises new alerts on the future of institutions and the reliability of statistics that political leaders, investors and everyday Americans use to see how the world’s wealthiest countries perform.

Trump fired his former leader this month after the agency reported a sharp decline in job growth.

Trump accused Commissioner Erika Mcentarfer of “manipulating” the numbers, a claim that economists have widely rejected.

They also made him choose Anthony’s, saying his economic comments were full of fundamental mistakes.

After the interview was published, an economist had advised Republicans in the past: “The vote confirmed that Antoni’s senator voted against BLS and its employment data.”

“The articles and tweets I’ve seen are probably the best mistakes of any think tank economist right now,” Jessica Riedl, a senior fellow at Manhattan College, another conservative think tank, also wrote on social media.

Antoni, a federal budget analyst at the Heritage Foundation, is a long-time critic of BLS. He called its statistics “Phoney Baloney” and last year urged the Ministry of Efficiency (DOGE) to “send chainsaws to the BLS”.

He said in a Fox interview that the work report includes the country’s unemployment rate, the number of jobs created last month, and other data are unreliable.

“This is a serious problem and needs to be addressed immediately,” Anthony said in an interview with Fox.

He added: “BLS should suspend the release of monthly work reports before corrections, but continue to release more accurate, albeit timely quarterly data.”

Republican chairman of the Senate committee, Bill Cassidy, will consider his nomination, criticized Mcentarfer after a major revision of employment data last year and said the reports have become inaccurate under her leadership.

He said in a statement that he would meet with Anthony, “we need a commissioner dedicated to providing accurate, impartial economic information to the American people.”

But, in a post by Fox on an interview with Fox, the committee’s top Democrat Patty Murray wrote: “Any senator who voted to confirm this party hacker voted to undermine the integrity of our country’s best economic and employment data, which is our entire economy.”

She then said she believed that BLS data would become “hypothetical” under Antoni.

White House spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt said Tuesday that the BLS will continue to release monthly employment reports, which is “plan and hope”, but repeated criticism of the agency’s statistics.

“We need to look at the means and methods of how BLS can obtain this very important data,” she said. “The purpose of course is to provide honest and good data to the American people.”

The BLS fight is at a time when debate on the U.S. economy intensifies, to what extent new tariffs will drive prices for businesses and consumers and slow growth.

The latest report from BLS shows that job growth and prices continue to rise, although at the same rate as last month.

Private companies also conduct surveys to measure inflation and hiring, but are considered less reliable than government data.

The Trump administration has taken other steps to reduce long-standing (sometimes basic) government functions.

His Education Secretary Linda McMahon has promised to demolish the department she leads, while EPA chief Lee Zeldin refocused his agency’s mission to deregulate, recently announced a landmark to identify a landmark that found greenhouse gases harmful to the environment.