President Donald Trump’s nominee to lead the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) has proposed ending releasing the aency’s closely watched jobs report each month.
Conservative economist EJ Antoni, a longtime critic of the bureau, floated the idea in an interview with Fox News on Monday, the same day that Trump officially announced him as his pick to lead the BLS.
The idea raised new alarm over the agency’s future and the reliability of its statistics, which are used by political leaders, investors and everyday Americans to get a sense of how the world’s richest country is faring.
Trump fired its former leader this month after the agency reported a sharp slowdown in jobs growth.
Antoni currently serves as a federal budget analyst at the Heritage Foundation.
He has previously criticised the BLS, calling its statistics “phoney baloney”.
Last November, he said in a post on X that the Department of Government Efficiency (Doge) “needs to take a chainsaw to the BLS”.