Trump's firing of data chief prompts questions about pressure to skew economic numbers upward

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump's nomination of a conservative ally to run the agency that generates a range of labor statistics is raising concerns among economists and Democratic lawmakers about the veracity of future economic data used to assess the state of the nation's economy.

Trump this past Monday nominated conservative economist E.J. Antoni to replace ousted Bureau of Labor Statistics Commissioner Erika McEntarfer, a Biden appointee Trump fired from the historically apolitical role earlier this month. The firing followed the release of a weak July jobs report that showed a slowdown in job growth, and routine revisions to the May and June reports that showed the United States added 258,000 fewer jobs than anticipated over those two months — data that Trump said was rigged to make him look bad as his tariff policies start to take hold.

The shake-up at the agency comes amid an ongoing push by Trump to shape the collection and distribution of government data. He has gutted agencies like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration that track health and environmental data. He ordered the removal of online datasets from government websites that did not comply with his executive order on gender classification. And most recently, he notified colleges and universities that they will need to disclose more information to the federal government about the race and gender of students and their academic performance amid an administration crackdown on race-based college admissions.

The bureau’s monthly jobs reports have long been regarded by investors and policymakers as a key measure of the country’s economic health, and any attempts to change the nature of the reports, as Antoni has suggested before his nomination, could lead to an incomplete or inaccurate picture of the U.S. economy, said economists interviewed by Newsday.

"If you destroy the American government's capacity to measure its economy, then it's going to be all about private data," Hofstra University economics Professor Robert Guttmann said. "You're going to get a lot of companies that are going to try, and they're going to have this kind of measure, and that kind of measure ... some of it will be interesting, some of it will be incomplete ... but once you have a commercialized machine doing data, it doesn't have the same objectivity as the government."

Trump on social media has accused the bureau of manipulating the numbers "in order to make the Republicans, and ME, look bad," but former BLS commissioners from both parties including Trump’s first-term appointee have said the data collection process is designed to keep commissioners from influencing the reports.

"It's not possible by design," former Trump appointed BLS Commissioner William Beach told the public radio station WBUR in an interview. "When I was commissioner, two years under Trump, two years under Biden, I was locked out of the process, as every commissioner before me was, of the preparation of these numbers. And the reason is quite clear: If I wasn't locked out, if there was even the hint that the commissioner could get in there and say, 'Well, you know, this number needs to be rounded up or rounded down' or something, that would mean political interference and the numbers would have less credibility in financial markets and in policymaking markets."

Quarterly reports?

Antoni, a former economist for the conservative think tank The Heritage Foundation and a co-author of the Project 2025 policy book that proposed many of the sweeping actions Trump has taken in his second term, suggested in an Aug. 4 interview with Fox News that the monthly jobs reports be paused in favor of quarterly reports, a recommendation that generated widespread pushback from prominent economists and prompted Antoni to reportedly walk back the idea, according to CNN.

Hofstra’s Guttmann said the monthly reports are critical, comparing it to "looking at the speedometer of your car."

"When job growth is slowing down, you want to see that. When it’s growing, or when there's some kind of shocks, you want to be able to see all of that," Guttmann said. "So instead of looking at something once a month, when you're looking at something every three months, you’re getting a very different picture when you’re trying to identify trends and identify problems."

The monthly reports are "an overall indicator of the health of the economy, and of the consumer and business demand for products," said Stony Brook University economics Professor Eva Carceles-Poveda. "Businesses tend to hire new employees when demand grows, and lay off employees when demand goes down and this affects the companies’ stock market values."

Investors use the monthly jobs report as a "potential indicator" of whether the Federal Reserve is going to cut or raise interest rates, said Carceles-Poveda, who serves as co-chair of the university’s Economics Department.

"A strong report might lower stock values if investors think the Fed will increase rates," she said.

Antoni in his Fox News interview took aim at routine revisions made to the reports months after they are released, in which they are updated to account for additional data collected after the initial release.

"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 said.

Antoni, who was among the Trump supporters pictured outside the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, according to an NBC News report, will likely need to testify before the Senate’s Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee as part of his confirmation process. The panel’s chairman, Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.), has also previously raised concerns about the process of revising the monthly reports after their release.

Opposition from Democrats

Senate Democrats, including Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), the chamber’s minority leader, have vowed to fight Antoni’s confirmation when Congress returns next month from its summer recess.

"BLS data drives decisions that touch every single American household — whether interest rates go up or down, whether businesses hire or fire, whether prices rise or fall," Schumer said in a statement following Antoni’s nomination. "Tampering with that data could destabilize markets, leading to chaos and uncertainty that could jack up borrowing costs, worsen inflation, and send the country into a recession. Antoni is wrong for the job and awful for Americans."

The White House did not return an email seeking comment about the concerns surrounding Antoni’s nomination, but White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said at a Tuesday briefing that the plan and "the hope" of the administration is to continue releasing the monthly reports.

"The president trusts him to lead this important department," Leavitt said of Antoni’s nomination.

A poll by The Economist/YouGov conducted the day of McEntarfer’s firing found "slightly more Americans completely or somewhat distrust federal data on the economy than trust it," by a split of 45%-42%. The poll found trust in the federal economic data was down 8% compared to March.

Hofstra University economics Professor Gregory DeFreitas, director of the school’s Center for the Study of Labor and Democracy, told Newsday he uses the BLS data to analyze the state of Long Island’s economy and worries that any attempts to curtail the monthly release or gut the agency’s staffing could "rob Long Islanders and people in other regions of the ability to figure out what's happening in their local economy."

"This could shake public confidence in the data that we use to both judge how different policies are going for businesses and how the markets they serve are changing," DeFreitas said in a phone interview. "We really depend heavily on reliable, independent, unbiased data, and by appointing a political person who has long criticized, without evidence, the value of the BLS data, it really raises alarms that there might be changes afoot that are going to make people basically not pay attention anymore to what has really been very high quality, reliable data."

By Laura Figueroa Hernandez

laura.figueroa@newsday.com@Laura_Figueroa

Laura Figueroa Hernandez is the White House correspondent and previously covered New York City politics and government. She joined Newsday in 2012 after covering state and local politics for The Miami Herald.