President Donald Trump’s pick to lead the Bureau of Labor Statistics suggested ending the monthly jobs report after the president raged about July’s numbers.
E.J. Antoni, who Trump tapped on Monday to lead the bureau, argued in an interview Tuesday with Fox Business that the data behind the monthly reports was unreliable and that it should be suspended.
“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.
He argued that “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.”
“How on earth are businesses supposed to plan – or how is the Fed supposed to conduct monetary policy – when they don’t know how many jobs are being added or lost in our economy? It’s a serious problem that needs to be fixed immediately,” Antoni said.
Trump announced he was nominating Antoni, the chief economist at the right-wing Heritage Foundation, to lead the bureau in a post on Monday. The president wrote “E.J. will ensure that the Numbers released are HONEST and ACCURATE.”
It comes after the White House blasted BLS following the July report, which showed the economy added 73,000 jobs last month. The bureau also revised May and June’s jobs numbers downward by a combined 258,000.
Just last week Antoni wrote there are “better ways to collect, process, and disseminate data—that is the task for the next BLS commissioner."
But multiple economists on Tuesday condemned his idea of suspending monthly reports as a “terrible idea.”
“More data and more timely data is better than less data and less-timely data,” Josh Bivens of the Economic Policy Institute, told Daily Beast.
“It would mean everybody – policymakers and businesses and households – would be flying more blind in making economic decisions," Bivens said.
“The obvious rationale for this is that the Trump admin worries that the economy is rapidly softening and they want to hide this as long as possible,” he added. “They’re likely right that it is softening – despite being handed a fundamentally strong economy they have charted an absolutely disastrous policy path and the consequences are coming closer upon us."
Antoni would need to be confirmed by the Senate to become the next BLS commissioner, but his nomination has already come under fire.
“Senators who vote to confirm Antoni are voting to essentially eviscerate the BLS and its jobs data,” wrote Jessica Riedl, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, who once worked for Republican Sen. Ron Portman, reacting to his suggestion of suspending monthly reports.
University of Michigan economics professor Justin Wolfers called ending monthly reports a “disastrously bad idea.”
“Non-farm payrolls data collection has been running continuously since 1939, through wars, and depressions, and global pandemics. At no point through that nearly century-long history, has anyone suggested that the public would be better off without these data,” he told the Daily Beast.
When asked about whether BLS will continue to put out the monthly jobs reports, the White House said that is the hope, but press secretary Karoline Leavitt blasted the data coming from the bureau.
“We need to look at the means and the methods of how the United States is acquiring this very important data, and all of that is going to be done,” Leavitt said.
After Trump revealed his nominee on Monday, economists from organizations across the political spectrum blasted the decision.
“E.J. Antoni is completely unqualified to be BLS Commissioner. He is an extreme partisan and does not have any relevant expertise,” wrote Jason Furman, a Harvard professor who chaired the Council of Economic Advisers under President Obama.
Others pointed out that Antoni’s articles and social media posts in recent years have been riddled with errors.
