President Donald Trump’s pick to lead the Bureau of Labor Statistics has already proposed data collection changes that would shift how the government enforces workplace laws, former Labor Department officials say.
The BLS collects data on a wide range of economic indicators used by the DOL to inform inspection plans, estimate how its regulations will affect employers and workers, and update its civil penalty amounts for inflation.
“It impacts your planning purposes,” said Andrew Stettner, a former unemployment insurance modernization official at the DOL who served in the Biden administration. “Some of the BLS data is used for wage and hour enforcement planning, job training allocations.”
The DOL oversees 11 million workplaces and enforces more than 100 federal laws that ensure workers are paid a minimum wage and receive overtime, jobs are safe, and employees receive their retirement and health-care benefits.
EJ Antoni, Trump’s nominee to serve as BLS commissioner, suggested this week the agency’s monthly jobs reports are flawed and should be released only on a quarterly basis until he changes how the government collects data. Trump fired his predecessor Erika McEntarfer after large corrections to the monthly jobs report, which the president said “eroded” the public’s trust.
“The fact that you consistently have large downward revisions means that there are other things wrong with your models and methodologies,” Antoni told Fox News Digital in an interview prior to his...
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