E.J. Antoni, President Donald Trump’s latest pick to lead the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), has ignited controversy in Washington and on Wall Street after publicly suggesting he may suspend the agency’s closely watched monthly jobs report over concerns about its accuracy and methodology. In an interview with Fox News Digital on Aug. 4, before his nomination, Antoni said that until the report is “corrected,” the BLS “should suspend issuing the monthly job reports but keep publishing the more accurate, though less timely, quarterly data.”
The move comes in the wake of Trump’s abrupt firing of Erika McEntarfer, the previous BLS commissioner, following a report that revealed not only disappointing job growth for July, but sharp downward revisions for prior months.
In early August, the BLS reported that U.S. employers added only 73,000 jobs in July, a figure that fell far short of economists’ projections. More alarming were the downward revisions to the May and June numbers: The agency slashed its estimates by a combined 258,000 jobs, showing that fewer than 20,000 jobs were created in each of the months of May and June.
Trump vented his frustrations on social media, alleging—without evidence—that the numbers were “rigged” to hurt his administration and the Republican Party. Hours later, he dismissed McEntarfer, who had been confirmed by the Senate in 2024 and had worked under both Democratic and Republican administrations.
Antoni’s call to halt monthly reports
The appointment of Antoni, chief economist at the Heritage Foundation and a vocal critic of BLS data methodologies, signaled a radical shift. In his Fox Business interview, Antoni argued the monthly jobs report is so unreliable
