Trump BLS Nominee Floats Ending Key Jobs Report
Brian Albrecht, ICLE Chief Economist, was recently quoted in The Week article on President Trump’s nomination of E.J. Antoni to lead the Bureau of Labor Statistics and Antoni’s proposal to suspend the monthly jobs report, a move that has sparked concerns over politicizing the agency and limiting key economic data. Read the full article here.
Many economists “share, to some degree, Antoni’s concerns” about the government’s jobs data, due largely to “trends such as declining response rates to its surveys,” The Associated Press said. But economists “from across the political spectrum” said an inexperienced “conservative ideologue” was the wrong person to tackle the issue. Antoni has “nothing in his writing or his résumé to suggest that he’s qualified for the position, besides that he is always manipulating the data to favor Trump in some way,” said Brian Albrecht, the chief economist at the International Center for Law and Economics.