Trump’s political hack nominee for the Bureau of Labor Statistics is already monkeying with the data.

The Senate mustn’t confirm him

Friends,

Sorry to intrude on your inbox again today, but I wanted to alert you to something. Trump’s political hack nominee to become the next commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics — the most important source of information about jobs, wages, and the economy — has already begun to f*ck around with the data, and he’s not even confirmed yet.

E.J. Antoni — who’s the chief economist of the Heritage Foundation and was a contributor to its Project 2025 (should tell you all you need to know) — says the BLS should stop issuing a monthly jobs report and instead publish jobs data every three months. He told Fox Business News:

“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.”

Hello? “Until it is corrected”? Antoni falsely assumes that the current monthly data are incorrect simply because the BLS later revised them.

Earth to Trump world: Revisions in the job numbers are inevitable. When I was secretary of labor, almost every month’s jobs report was revised upward or downward in subsequent months as more data became available.

Measuring a $30 trillion economy is tricky at best. The most accurate jobs data is based on Social Security filings, tax returns, and other records that aren’t available until months or years later.

The answer isn’t to stop the monthly reports. Decision-makers who rely on them know that revisions are normal and inevitable, but they’re prepared to trade off some accuracy for the sake of timeliness.

They want the BLS’s preliminary information as soon as possible because they need to make preliminary decisions.

Antoni told Fox he doesn’t believe the BLS intentionally manipulated the latest jobs data — in contrast to Trump, who claimed without evidence that the bureau’s downward revisions of the May and June reports were “RIGGED in order to make the Republicans, and ME, look bad.”

But Antoni takes issue with the BLS’s methods of collecting data, noting that its revisions have been significantly larger since the pandemic.

Of course they’ve been larger since the pandemic. The pandemic’s ripple effects on global supply chains and business and household incomes are still being felt. Many businesses closed, and some workers are still looking for jobs. That’s made measurement more difficult.

The larger reality that Trump doesn’t want Americans to know about is that job growth in the United States has slowed dramatically in recent months. That’s largely because of the uncertainty and chaos Trump has unleashed on the economy.

Businesses are holding back on new hiring because they don’t know what the hell is going to happen once Trump’s on-again-off-again-higher-or-lower tariffs are finally put into place.

I suspect that Trump and the putative commissioner hope that with job numbers appearing every three months instead of every month, the subsequent (and inevitable) revisions three months later won’t get much attention. As with everything else he does, Trump is counting on Americans having short memories and even shorter attention spans.

The answer is for all of us to receive timely and objective monthly job numbers, even if those numbers are revised as more accurate information comes in. And to ensure that one of Trump’s sycophants isn’t in charge of getting them out.

Earth to the Senate: Don’t confirm Antoni.