E.J. Antoni, President Donald Trump’s pick to lead the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the chief economist at the right-leaning Heritage Foundation, floated pausing the monthly jobs report amid accuracy concerns. Market pros say that would be a terrible move.
Antoni told Fox News Digital on August 4 in an interview before his nomination that, “until it is corrected, the BLS should suspend issuing the monthly job reports but keep publishing the more accurate, though less timely, quarterly data.”
Economists and market strategists told Business Insider on Tuesday that such a move would be damaging for investors and economic planners. It could lower trust in the timeliest data on unemployment and job growth, which gives insight into how corporate earnings will perform and the broader state of the US economy.
“The markets depend on employment reports and the inflation reports and those types of things for direction,” said Lance Roberts, the chief strategist at RIA Advisors, which manages $2 billion. “You try to suspend that data, without really good reason, that’s going to cause problems for markets.”
Roberts said that it’s important to keep the monthly pace for the non-farm payrolls report, and that revisions are part of the data-collection process.
“We revise GDP data every year, and then we revise it every three years, and the markets never freak out,” he said, adding: “Markets run real-time, they need real-time data.”
Max Stier, the president and CEO of Partnership for Public Service, told Business Insider that BLS data plays a key role in both the overall economy and people’s financial decisions.
“It is imperative that the bureau continues to report this information in a timely, unbiased way to preserve its trustworthiness as an institution,” Stier said.
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Stier added that if Antoni is confirmed by the Senate to take on the commissioner role, he urges “Antoni to partner with the bureau’s expert civil service to maintain the nonpartisan collection and presentation of their economic data.”
Elizabeth Renter, senior economist at NerdWallet, said the monthly jobs data shouldn’t be suspended or delayed.
“The biggest revisions to jobs data often happen when the economy hits a turning point — economists and economic policymakers largely understand this,” Renter said. “To slow the availability of the data at such a juncture could severely hamper the ability of the Fed to conduct effective monetary policy, among other things.”
Not everyone agrees, however. Irene Tunkel, the chief strategist of US equity strategy at BCA Research, told Business Insider on Tuesday that moving to a quarterly pace where the BLS has more time to survey businesses would be a better approach. Theoretically, a quarterly cadence would result in fewer revisions, Tunkel said, adding that the market can rely on private data from sources like ADP for more real-time information.
But private data sources don’t have the funding that the BLS does, and are therefore even less reliable, said Preston Caldwell, a US economist at Morningstar.
“If markets believed the CES conveyed no useful information, they would already ignore it — no damage done. So why suspend it? There’s not a good substitute for the CES,” Caldwell wrote in an email, referencing the Current Employment Statistics survey that produces the monthly job creation numbers from the BLS.
“If there was a cheap way to do it, a third-party data provider might be doing it already. But that’s not the case.”
Antoni’s comments follow a worse-than-expected July jobs report
Antoni was nominated to the BLS role on August 11 after Trump fired former commissioner and Biden appointee Dr. Erika McEntarfer on August 1.
“Our Economy is booming, and E.J. will ensure that the Numbers released are HONEST and ACCURATE,” Trump wrote in a Truth Social post.
A disappointing jobs report showed the US economy added 73,000 jobs in July, missing the consensus 106,000, and revisions to the previous two months showed there were way fewer jobs added than earlier reported. Revisions are a normal part of the BLS data collection, though the agency has struggled in recent years with limited resources and declining survey response rates.
The president claimed that the data was “RIGGED in order to make the Republicans, and ME, look bad.”
‘”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 told Fox News Digital, adding, “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.”
Antoni has not yet been confirmed as commissioner. The Heritage Foundation and BLS did not immediately respond to Business Insider’s requests for comment.
“Hiding the numbers just makes it that much harder to use the tools available to avoid further economic pain, prepare for what people need, and guard against a recession,” former acting Secretary of Labor Julie Su told Business Insider.
Asked whether the BLS would continue to put out a monthly payrolls report, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a press conference on Tuesday that she believes that will be the case.
“I believe that is the plan and that’s the hope and that these monthly reports will be data that the American people can trust,” Leavitt said.
