President Donald Trump’s pick to head the Bureau of Labor Statistics, EJ Antoni, has suggested the bureau suspend its closely-watched monthly jobs report – though a colleague of Antoni’s says he has changed his mind about that.
In an interview with Fox News Digital that was taped on Aug. 4 (a week before his nomination) but only released on Aug. 11, Antoni said the BLS’s monthly numbers are unreliable because of frequent and sometimes large revisions made to the numbers in subsequent reports.
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,” said Antoni, who is the chief economist at the conservative-leaning Heritage Foundation.
“Until it is corrected, the BLS should suspend issuing the monthly job reports but keep publishing the more accurate, though less timely, quarterly data… 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.”
However, economist Stephen Moore, also of the Heritage Foundation, told CNN that Antoni has since changed his mind.
“I think it’s a bad idea to do that. In fact, I’ve talked to EJ about it, and he’s not going to do that. We need monthly numbers,” Moore said. “Now what he’s talking about is we do a quarterly number that’s much more accurate than the monthly one, and he’s saying maybe – but he’s backed off that. We’re going to continue to do monthly numbers.”
Trump Fires BLS Chief
President Trump abruptly fired the previous BLS chief, Erika McEntarfer, on Aug. 1, after a disappointing July jobs report that showed a lower-than-expected 73,000 jobs created in the US that month.
The report also revised the May and June numbers, showing that 258,000 fewer jobs had been created in those months than had originally been reported.
Trump claimed the numbers were intentionally “rigged” to harm his administration.
“In my opinion, today’s Jobs Numbers were RIGGED in order to make the Republicans, and ME, look bad,” Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social.
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Criticism from Democrats
Many Washington Democrats argued that McEntarfer’s firing is a sign that it’s Trump himself who wants to rig the numbers, and warned that jobs data could become much more unreliable if the head of the BLS fears being fired whenever the data shows weak job growth.
“Bottom line, Trump wants to cook the books,” said Sen. Ron Wyden, the top Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee.
Wyden said McEntarfer’s firing is “the act of somebody who is soft, weak, and afraid to own up to the reality of the damage his chaos is inflicting on our economy.”
BLS Monthly Jobs Numbers
Trump has been criticizing BLS numbers since before he took office in January, accusing it of distorting the data to make the previous Biden administration look better on job creation than it really was.
Some economists have criticized the BLS’s monthly jobs numbers because, in recent times, they have been revised downwards more than upwards.
By overstating the numbers, these economists argue, the BLS is causing stock and bond markets to be distorted, as those markets react to initial job numbers more than to later revisions.
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However, most of these economists – including Antoni himself – have focused on problems with methodology, such as a decline in businesses’ response rate to BLS surveys and difficulties in counting the number of immigrants joining the US workforce.
Most reject the idea that BLS numbers are distorted for political reasons.
Revisions from 2023
The BLS considers its initial monthly jobs numbers to be a preliminary snapshot of the state of job creation, as the report comes out very quickly after the end of a month.
The bureau continues to collect survey responses and other data points, revising the numbers in subsequent reports.
While it is the case that in 2023 the initial BLS numbers frequently overstated job creation numbers, that problem appears to have dissipated by 2024.
In 2023, 10 of the 12 monthly jobs reports were revised downwards when comparing first and third estimates, while only two were later revised upwards.
However, in 2024, six reports were revised downwards and six reports were revised upwards.
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