White House withdraws Antoni's nomination to lead BLS

By Jasper Ward, Jarrett Renshaw and Bo Erickson WASHINGTON (Reuters) -The Trump administration has withdrawn its nomination of conservative economist E.J. Antoni as head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the White House said on Tuesday. President Donald Trump nominated Antoni last month to lead the bureau, which is part of the Department of Labor and produces statistics closely watched by the markets, after firing the agency's head, Erika McEntarfer, and accusing her without evidence of manipulating the bureau's figures. “Dr. EJ Antoni is a brilliant economist and an American patriot that will continue to do good work on behalf of our great country," a White House official said in a statement, promising the president will announce a new nominee "very soon." The Senate committee overseeing the Labor Department never scheduled a confirmation hearing, and on Tuesday, Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska said she remained concerned about Antoni's nomination. A person familiar with the nomination said several other Republicans expressed similar hesitation. CNN first reported that the administration had pulled Antoni's nomination. Antoni currently serves as chief economist at the conservative think tank the Heritage Foundation and has been a critic of the BLS, whose monthly job market and inflation report is used by a global audience of economists, investors, business leaders, public policymakers and consumers. The U.S. lurched toward a government shutdown on Tuesday as a vote to extend funding past a midnight deadline failed in the U.S. Senate. A shutdown would delay the release of the September jobs numbers, which are due out on Friday. Antoni's nomination raised concerns among economists about the quality of BLS data. "The nominee will result in a surge in demand for private label data," Joe Brusuelas, chief economist at RSM US, said in August. Alex Jacquez, the head of policy and advocacy for Groundwork Collaborative, which describes itself as fighting "to change economic policy and narratives in order to build public power," said at the time that Antoni's selection was "a clear assault on independent analysis that will have far-reaching implications for the reliability of U.S. economic data." The BLS has come under scrutiny from Republicans after Trump took issue with its data. Senator Bill Cassidy, the Republican chairman of the committee that oversees the confirmation process, said in a statement that the "status quo" is not working with the jobs data. Trump added to growing concerns about the reliability of BLS and other federal government economic data when he fired McEntarfer 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. (Reporting by Jasper Ward, Jarrett Renshaw and Bo Erickson; Editing by Don Durfee, Leslie Adler and Michael Perry)

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