Antoni, a federal budget analyst at the Heritage Foundation, is a longtime critic of the BLS. He has called its statistics “phoney baloney” and last year urged the Department of Government Efficiency (Doge) “to take a chainsaw to the BLS”.
In the Fox interview, he said the jobs report, which includes the country’s unemployment rate, the number of jobs created over the last month, and other data, was unreliable.
“It’s a serious problem that needs to be fixed immediately,” Antoni said in the Fox interview, which was conducted before Trump named him to lead the BLS.
“Until it is corrected, the BLS should suspend issuing the monthly job reports but keep publishing the more accurate, though less timely, quarterly data,” he added.
Senator Bill Cassidy, the Republican chairman of the Senate committee that will consider his nomination, had criticised McEntarfer after a major revision to employment data last year and said that the reports had become less accurate under her leadership.
He said in a statement he would meet with Antoni and that “we need a BLS Commissioner committed to producing accurate, unbiased economic information to the American people”.
But in a blistering post on X afer the Fox interview was published, a top Democrat on the committee, Patty Murray, wrote: “Any Senator who votes to confirm this partisan hack is voting to shred the integrity of our nation’s best economic and jobs data, which underpin our entire economy.”
She then said that she believed BLS data would become “make-believe” under Antoni.