By Dan Burns
(Reuters) -The White House on Tuesday said it is “the plan” that the Bureau of Labor Statistics will continue to publish its closely watched monthly employment report after President Donald Trump’s pick to head the agency proposed suspending its release while it addresses problems that resulted in historically large revisions to recent job growth estimates.
Asked if the agency would continue to put out the monthly “Employment Situation” report, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters, “I believe that is the plan, and that’s the hope.”
Leavitt’s comment followed remarks on August 4 from E.J. Antoni, who in a Fox News Digital interview a week before Trump’s announcement of his nomination as the next BLS commissioner said: “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,” he said.
Neither Antoni nor the conservative Heritage Foundation where he is currently chief economist replied immediately to a request for comment.
The opening that Trump is proposing that Antoni fill as BLS commissioner arose after the president fired the previous commissioner, Erika McEntarfer, hours after the agency reported much weaker-than-expected job growth for July and issued historically large revisions to the data for May and June.
Antoni, who must be confirmed by the U.S. Senate, has a track record of criticizing the quality of BLS data under former President Joe Biden’s administration. In an opinion piece in the New York Post last year after a sharp downward revision to the level of employment from April 2023 through March 2024 as part of the BLS annual benchmark revision process, Antoni said “the Biden-Harris Labor Department seems to exist in the land of make-believe.”
The nonfarm payrolls report provides a monthly snapshot of the U.S. job market, offering scores of figures including how many jobs were created, what the unemployment rate was, how many people joined or left the labor force, 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 underlie the statistics. They are also subject to an annual benchmark revision process.
Since the COVID-19 pandemic, response rates to the surveys underlying that report and others conducted by BLS have fallen sharply, and the size of revisions has grown in the last few years.
(Reporting by Dan Burns; Editing by Paul Simao)
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