FILE PHOTO: A person walks by the Department of Labor headquarters in Washington, D.C., U.S., May 13, 2021. REUTERS/Andrew Kelly/File Photo

By Dan Burns and Lucia Mutikani

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -U.S. President Donald Trump on Monday said he was nominating economist E.J. Antoni as the new Bureau of Labor Statistics commissioner, 10 days after firing the agency's previous leader following a weak scorecard of the job market, accusing her without evidence of manipulating the figures.

Antoni is currently the chief economist at the influential conservative think tank Heritage Foundation. He has been critical of the BLS, the Labor Department's statistical agency, whose monthly figures about the state of the job market and inflation are consumed by a global audience of economists, investors, business leaders, public policymakers and consumers.

Their release routinely has a visible and real-time effect on stock, bond and currency markets around the world.

"Our Economy is booming, and E.J. will ensure that the Numbers released are HONEST and ACCURATE," Trump said on Truth Social.

Antoni last year wrote an opinion piece in the New York Post, stating "the Biden-Harris Labor Department seems to exist in the land of make-believe." That was after the BLS published data estimating a sharp downward revision to the level of employment from April 2023-through March 2024.

The nomination of Antoni, who contributed to "Project 2025," the controversial conservative plan to overhaul the government, was met with reservations from economists.

"The nominee will result in a surge in demand for private label data," said Joe Brusuelas, chief economist at RSM US.

Groundwork Collaborative's head of policy and advocacy Alex Jacquez called Antoni a "sycophant," adding his selection was "a clear assault on independent analysis that will have far-reaching implications for the reliability of U.S. economic data."

Antoni, who must be confirmed by the Senate, would take over an agency that has come under heightened scrutiny for the eroding quality of the data it produces.

Trump added to growing concerns about the reliability of BLS and other federal government economic data when he fired Erika McEntarfer as BLS commissioner on August 1. Her dismissal came hours after the agency reported much weaker-than-expected job growth for July and issued an historically large revision to its employment figures for May and June.

UNFOUNDED CLAIMS

In announcing her firing, Trump accused McEntarfer - appointed to the role by former President Joe Biden - of manipulating the employment data for political purposes. There is no evidence of that being true.

He promised he would replace her "with someone much more competent and qualified." Antoni, who holds a doctoral degree in economics, was previously an economist at the Texas Public Policy Foundation and has taught courses on labor economics, money and banking, according to the Heritage Foundation.

He must now address the difficulties BLS has had with declining survey response rates and with data collection problems in other critical statistical series, such as for inflation.

"He does have the necessary economic credentials, but that doesn't mean he understands how BLS puts together the data and how revisions are put together on a monthly basis," said Sung Won Sohn, finance and economics professor at Loyola Marymount University. "Some of the data that will be forthcoming will not be to President Trump's liking, it will be interesting how he would explain that and how the president would react to that."

The nonfarm payrolls report provides a monthly snapshot of the U.S. job market, offering scores of figures including how many jobs were created, what the unemployment rate was, how many people joined or left the labor force and what workers earn per hour and how many hours they work in a week.

Its headline estimates for job creation are revised twice after their initial release to account for the submission of additional survey responses from employers and updates to the seasonal factors that underlie the statistics. They are also subject to an annual benchmark revision process.

The monthly Consumer Price Index and Producer Price Index together historically have provided a comprehensive picture of U.S. inflation, including hundreds of data points depicting the changes in cost for everything from eggs to auto insurance, figures relied upon heavily by policymakers like those at the Federal Reserve. CPI is used to set the annual cost-of-living-adjustment for retirees receiving Social Security payments.

Years of underfunding of the BLS under both Republican and Democratic administrations and Trump White House's unprecedented campaign to reshape the government through deep spending cuts and mass layoffs of public workers have led to the suspension of data collection for portions of the CPI basket in some areas across the country.

That has led to the BLS using imputations to fill in the missing information. The percentage of prices that are imputed rather than gathered has more than tripled this year to 35%.

"I can't help but worry some deadlines are going to be missed and undetected biases or other errors are going to start creeping into some of these reports just because of the reduction in staff," Erica Groshen, who served as BLS commissioner from 2013 to 2017 during President Barack Obama's second term and the first months of Trump's first term.

(Reporting by Dan Burns and Lucia Mutikani; Additional reporting by Jasper Ward and Ismail Shakil; Editing by Caitlin Webber and Michael Perry)