The price data has already been collected, but it must be processed and analyzed. Employees called back are economists and IT specialists, an administration source familiar with the plan told the Times. Data collection will still be suspended, meaning next month’s report may be delayed if the government shutdown continues.
The report will be released at 8:30 a.m. EDT on Oct. 24, CNBC reported. It was originally scheduled for Oct. 15.
The reason for the release of the new report is that federal law requires the Social Security Administration to adjust Social Security benefits annually based on inflation from the third quarter, and the adjustment must be published by Nov. 1.
But the delay could make it impossible for the administration to meet the deadline.
Other BLS reports, such as the nonfarm payrolls report, have not been released since the shutdown. That report was scheduled for Oct. 3.
WASHINGTON — The director of the agency that produces the nation’s jobs and inflation data is typically a mild-mannered technocrat, often with extensive experience in statistical agencies, with little public profile.
But like so much in President Trump’s second administration, this time is different.
Trump has selected E.J. Antoni, chief economist at the conservative Heritage Foundation, to be the next commissioner at the Labor Department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics. Antoni’s nomination was quickly met with a cascade of criticism from other economists, from across the political spectrum.
His selection threatens to bring a new level of politicization to what for decades has been a nonpartisan agency widely accepted as a producer of reliable measures of the nation’s economic health. Although many former Labor Department officials say it is unlikely Antoni will be able to distort or alter the data, particularly in the short run, he could change the currently dry-as-dust way it is presented.
Antoni was nominated by Trump after the BLS released a jobs report Aug. 1 that showed that hiring had weakened in July and was much lower in May and June than the agency had previously reported. Trump, without evidence, charged that the data had been “rigged” for political reasons and fired the then-BLS chair, Erika McEntarfer, much to the dismay of many within the agency.
Antoni has been a vocal critic of the government’s jobs data in frequent appearances on podcasts and cable TV. His partisan commentary is unusual for someone who may end up leading the BLS.
For instance, on Aug. 4 — a week before he was nominated — Antoni said in an interview on Fox News Digital that the Labor Department should stop publishing the monthly jobs reports until its data collection processes improve, and rely on quarterly data based on actual employment filings with state unemployment offices.
The monthly employment reports are probably the closest-watched economic data on Wall Street, and can frequently cause swings in stock prices.
When asked at Tuesday’s White House briefing whether the jobs report would continue to be released, Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said the administration hoped it would be.
“I believe that is the plan and that’s the hope,” Leavitt said.
Leavitt also defended Antoni’s nomination, calling him an “economic expert” who has testified before Congress and adding that “the president trusts him to lead this important department.”
Yet Antoni’s TV and podcast appearances have created more of a portrait of a conservative ideologue than a careful economist who considers trade-offs and prioritizes getting the math correct.
“There’s just nothing in his writing or his resume 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, chief economist at the International Center for Law and Economics.
Antoni wrongly claimed in the last year of Biden’s presidency that the economy had been in recession since 2022; called on the entire Federal Reserve board to be fired for not earning a profit on its Treasury securities holdings; and posted a chart on social media that conflated timelines to suggest inflation was headed to 15%.
His argument that the U.S. was in a recession rested on a vastly exaggerated measure of housing inflation, based on newly purchased home prices, to artificially make the nation’s gross domestic product appear smaller than it was.
“This is actually maybe the worst Antoni content I’ve seen yet,” Alan Cole of the center-right Tax Foundation said on social media, referring to his recession claim.
On a 2024 podcast, Antoni wanted to sunset Social Security payments for workers paying into the system, saying that “you’ll need a generation of people who pay Social Security taxes but never actually receive any of those benefits.” As head of the BLS, Antoni would oversee the release of the consumer price index by which Social Security payments are adjusted for inflation.
Many economists share, to some degree, Antoni’s concerns that the government’s jobs data have flaws and are threatened by trends such as declining response rates to its surveys. The drop has made the jobs figures more volatile, though not necessarily less accurate over time.
“The stock market moves clearly based on these job numbers, and so people with skin in the game think it’s telling them something about the future of their investments,” Albrecht said. “Could it be improved? Absolutely.”
Katharine Abraham, an economist at the University of Maryland who was BLS commissioner under President Clinton, said updating the jobs report’s methods would require at least some initial investment.
The government could use more modern data sources, she said, such as figures from payroll processing companies, and fill in gaps with surveys.
“There’s an inconsistency between saying you want higher response rates and you want to spend less money,” she said, referring to the administration’s proposals to cut BLS funding.
Still, Abraham and other former BLS commissioners don’t think Antoni, if confirmed, would be able to alter the figures. But he could push for changes in the monthly news release and seek to portray the numbers in a more positive light.
William Beach, who was appointed BLS commissioner by Trump in his first term and also served under Biden, said he is confident that BLS procedures are strong enough to prevent political meddling. He said he didn’t see the figures himself until two days before publication when he served as commissioner.
“The commissioner does not affect the numbers,’’ Beach said. “They don’t collect the data. They don’t massage the data. They don’t organize it.”
Regarding the odds of rigging the numbers, Beach said, “I wouldn’t put it at complete zero, but I’d put it pretty close to zero.’’
It took about six months after McEntarfer was nominated in July 2023 for her to be approved. Antoni will probably face stiff opposition from Democrats, but that may not be enough to derail his appointment.
Sen. Patty Murray, a senior Democrat from Washington, on Tuesday slammed Antoni as “an unqualified right-wing extremist” and demanded that the Republican chair of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, hold a confirmation hearing for him.
Rugaber and Boak write for the Associated Press. AP writers Paul Wiseman and Stephen Groves contributed to this report.
Aug. 3 (UPI) — Economists are lining up to defend Bureau of Labor Statistics commissioner Erika McEntarfer, who was fired by President Donald Trump on Friday over his allegations that the agency manipulated a report showing low job growth for July.
“It has been the honor of my life to serve as Commissioner of BLS alongside the many dedicated civil servants tasked with measuring a vast and dynamic economy. It is vital and important work and I thank them for their service to this nation,” McEntarfer said on social media Friday.
Her firing came after the July report had shown that jobs growth was slower than expected as the unemployment rose, with the United States only adding 73,000 new jobs for the month — down from 147,000 new jobs added in June.
“Today’s jobs numbers were rigged in order to make Republicans and me look bad,” Trump had said Friday afternoon in a Truth Social post.
Former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers called Trump’s accusations a “preposterous charge” in an interview with ABC News’ “This Week” program Sunday.
“These numbers are put together by teams of literally hundreds of people following detailed procedures that are in manuals. There’s no conceivable way that the head of the BLS could have manipulated this number,” Summers said.
Summers said that the numbers in the job report were “in line” with data and information being reviewed in the private sector and criticized Trump for his “authoritarian” removal of McEntarfer.
“Firing statisticians goes with threatening the heads of newspapers. It goes with launching assaults on universities. It goes with launching assaults on law firms that defend clients that the elected boss finds uncongenial,” he said. “This is really scary stuff.”
Bill Beach, McEntarfer’s predecessor, appeared in an interview with CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday where he likewise called the move by Trump “totally groundless” and dangerous.
“The commissioner doesn’t see the numbers until Wednesday before they’re published. By the time the commissioner sees the numbers, they’re all prepared. They’re locked into the computer system,” Beach said.
Beach said that the only thing the commissioner can do before the jobs report is published is review the text accompanying the data, as he explained part of the process of how they’re compiled.
“What I think really upset the president on Friday were the revisions to May and June, big revisions. But that’s because, like every time we publish on Friday, there are revisions to the previous two months,” he said. “This is a survey. And a survey has sample returns.”
Beach said the jobs reports are compiled from surveys that are sent out to Americans and hundreds of thousands of businesses each month. But the BLS doesn’t receive all the returns in time, keeping the window for responses open an extra two months.
“What you saw on Friday was the effect of trying to do a better job, getting more information,” Beach said.
During his interview, Beach was asked if he would believe future report numbers compiled by the BLS after a successor for McEntarfer is found.
“I will, because I know the people who work there. They are some of the most loyal Americans you can imagine. They have worked in every kind of political circumstance. They are completely devoted to producing the very best gold standard data possible,” he said. “And that’s why BLS is the finest statistical agency in the entire world. Its numbers are trusted all over the world. So, I will trust those numbers.”
Still, White House officials aimed Sunday to double down on the president’s claim that the data was being manipulated, without evidence.
White House economic adviser Kevin Hassett was interviewed on NBC News’ “Meet the Press” on Sunday and said that the BLS needs a “fresh set of eyes.”
“There have been a bunch of patterns that could make people wonder,” he said. “And I think the most important thing for people to know is that it’s the president’s highest priority that the data be trusted and that people get to the bottom of why these revisions are so unreliable.”
The far-right political activist Laura Loomer, who is not an official member of the Trump administration but has positioned herself as an informal chief adviser on personnel matters, called the BLS situation a “vetting crisis.”
“Great job by President Trump who just announced he is firing Biden holdover Erika McEntarfer, the Commissioner of Labor Statistics,” she said on social media. “Every single Biden holdover must be FIRED.”
When United States President Donald Trump unveiled his steep “reciprocal” tariffs on dozens of countries in April, economists issued warnings of catastrophic economic harm.
So far, their fears have not materialised.
The US economy – the single biggest driver of global growth – has defied expectations across numerous metrics, with inflation staying low, employment and consumer spending remaining robust, and the stock market reaching record highs.
Still, even if the limited fallout from Trump’s tariffs has taken some analysts by surprise, economists warn that the US and global economies may just be experiencing the calm before the storm.
Dozens of US trade partners, including close allies such as South Korea and Japan, are facing tariffs of 25 percent to 40 percent unless they seal trade deals with the Trump administration by an August 1 deadline.
“When you start to see tariffs at 20 or more, you reach a point where firms may stop importing altogether,” Joseph Foudy, an economics professor at the New York University Stern School of Business, told Al Jazeera.
“Firms simply postpone major decisions, delay hiring, and economic activity declines,” Foudy added.
“The uncertainty around trade in that sense is as costly as the actual tariff rates.”
Even countries that are able to hammer out a deal in time are likely to face significantly higher duties.
Trump’s preliminary agreements with Vietnam and China, announced in May and early July, respectively, stipulate minimum tariff rates of 20 percent and 30 percent.
On Friday, the Financial Times reported that Trump was pushing for a tariff of 15-20 percent on the European Union, which is the US’s single largest trading partner and is facing a 30 percent duty from August 1, in any deal reached with the bloc.
Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, has warned that Trump’s mooted 30 percent tariff would “disrupt essential transatlantic supply chains, to the detriment of businesses, consumers and patients on both sides of the Atlantic”.
Bottles of wine are seen on display for sale in a wine shop in Paris, France, on March 13, 2025. [Stephanie Lecocq/Reuters]
‘Harm growth’
“In my view, the few tariff agreements that have been reached represent nontrivial changes in US trade policy and so will harm growth, so even if much less extreme than threatened, will matter,” Steven Durlauf, a professor of economics at the University of Chicago, told Al Jazeera.
Economists widely agree that the impact of tariffs implemented so far has not been fully felt, as many businesses built up their stockpiles of inventories in advance to mitigate rising costs.
Under the existing measures – including a baseline 10 percent duty on nearly all countries, and higher levies on cars and steel – the effective average US tariff rate currently stands at 16.6 percent, with the rate set to rise 20.6 percent from August 1, according to The Budget Lab at Yale Department of Economics.
Even if Trump does not sharply hike tariffs on August 1, economists expect inflation to rise at least somewhat in the coming months, with higher prices in turn likely to drag on growth.
In an analysis published last month, BBVA Research estimated that even the current level of US tariffs could reduce global gross domestic product (GDP) by 0.5 of a percentage point in the short term, and by more than 2 percentage points over the medium term.
“It is too soon to expect big effects on prices in the US, as there was a large increase in exports to the US in anticipation of higher tariffs, and firms are waiting to see where things will end up in terms of tariffs that affect them. So, not surprising, we have seen limited effects so far,” Bernard Hoekman, director of Global Economics at the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy, told Al Jazeera.
“But if the US does what it has indicated it wants to do – raise average tariffs to the 20-30 percent level – there will be a much larger impact.”
Trump and his allies have repeatedly dismissed economists’ warnings about his tariffs, pointing to the steady stream of positive data to make the case that the economic consensus is flawed.
“The Fake News and the so-called ‘Experts’ were wrong again,” Trump wrote on Truth Social in response to a recent report from his Council of Economic Advisers (CEA) that found prices of imported goods fell by 0.1 percent from December to May.
“Tariffs are making our Country ‘BOOM.’”
Vehicles for export are seen at a port in Pyeongtaek, South Korea, on July 8, 2025 [Anthony Wallace/AFP]
The CEA report’s methodology drew criticism from some economic analysts, with the National Taxpayers Union saying it failed to take account of stockpiling by importers and covered a period that was “way too short to draw any definitive conclusions”.
Despite the strong headline figures on the US economy, economists have also pointed to warning signs in the data.
In a note last week, Wells Fargo economists Tim Quinlan and Shannon Grein pointed out that discretionary spending on services in the US fell 0.3 percent in the year up to May, indicating potential economic storm clouds ahead.
“That is admittedly a modest decline, but what makes it scary is that in 60+ years, this measure has only declined either during or immediately after recessions,” Quinlan and Grein said.
Durlauf, the University of Chicago professor, said the Trump administration had little cause to see the relative health of the economy up until now as a vindication of its economic plans.
“First, there is widespread belief that tariff threats will not be realised in actual agreements. Second, the effects of tariffs on prices and output take some time to work through the system,” Durlauf said.
“There is no sense that the absence of large effects on real activity and inflation, so far, in any way vindicate claims of the Trump administration.”
United States inflation rose last month to its highest level since February as President Donald Trump’s sweeping tariffs push up the cost of a range of goods, including furniture, clothing, and large appliances.
Consumer prices rose 2.7 percent in June from a year earlier, the Labor Department said on Tuesday, up from an annual increase of 2.4 percent in May. On a monthly basis, prices climbed 0.3 percent from May to June, after rising just 0.1 percent the previous month.
Worsening inflation poses a political challenge for Trump, who promised during last year’s presidential campaign to immediately lower costs. The sharp inflation spike after the pandemic was the worst in four decades and soured most Americans on former President Joe Biden’s handling of the economy. Higher inflation will also likely heighten the US Federal Reserve’s reluctance to cut its short-term interest rate, as Trump is loudly demanding.
The central bank is expected to leave its benchmark overnight interest rate in the 4.25 percent to 4.5 percent range at a policy meeting later this month.
Trump has insisted repeatedly that there is “no inflation”, and because of that, the central bank should swiftly reduce its key interest rate from its current level. Yet Fed Chair Jerome Powell has said that he wants to see how the economy reacts to Trump’s duties before reducing borrowing costs. Minutes of the central bank’s June 17-18 meeting, which were published last week, showed only “a couple” of officials said they felt rates could fall as soon as the July 29-30 meeting.
Excluding the volatile food and energy categories, core inflation increased 2.9 percent in June from a year earlier, up from 2.8 percent in May. On a monthly basis, it picked up 0.2 percent from May to June. Economists closely watch core prices because they typically provide a better sense of where inflation is headed.
The uptick in inflation was driven by a range of higher prices. The cost of gasoline rose 1 percent just from May to June, while grocery prices increased 0.3 percent. Appliance prices jumped for the third straight month. Toys, clothes, audio equipment, shoes, and sporting goods all got more expensive, and are all heavily imported.
“You are starting to see scattered bits of the tariff inflation regime filter in,” said Eric Winograd, chief economist at asset management firm AllianceBernstein, who added that the cost of long-lasting goods rose last month, compared with a year ago, for the first time in about three years.
Winograd also noted that housing costs, one of the biggest drivers of inflation since the pandemic, have continued to cool, which is holding down broader inflation. The cost of rent rose 3.8 percent in June compared with a year ago, the smallest yearly increase since late 2021.
“Were it not for the tariff uncertainty, the Fed would already be cutting rates,” Winograd said. “The question is whether there is more to come, and the Fed clearly thinks there is,” along with most economists.
Trump has imposed sweeping duties of 10 percent on all imports, plus 50-percent levies on steel and aluminium, 30 percent on goods from China, and 25 percent on imported cars. Just last week, the president threatened to hit the European Union with a new 30 percent tariff starting August 1.
He has also threatened to slap 50 percent duties on Brazil, which would push up the cost of orange juice and coffee. Orange prices leapt 3.5 percent just from May to June, and are 3.4 percent higher than a year ago.
Overall, grocery prices rose 0.3 percent last month and are up 2.4 percent from a year earlier. While that is a much smaller annual increase than before the pandemic, it is slightly bigger than the pre-pandemic pace of food price increases. The Trump administration has also placed a 17-percent duty on Mexican tomatoes.
Powell under fire
The acceleration in inflation could provide a respite of sorts for Powell, who has come under increasingly heavy fire from the White House for not cutting the benchmark interest rate.
The Fed chair has said that the duties could both push up prices and slow the economy, a tricky combination for the central bank since higher costs would typically lead the Fed to hike rates while a weaker economy often spurs it to reduce them.
Trump on Monday said that Powell has been “terrible” and “doesn’t know what the hell he’s doing.” The president added that the economy was doing well despite Powell’s refusal to reduce rates, but it would be “nice” if there were rate cuts, because people would be able to buy housing a lot easier.”
Last week, White House officials also attacked Powell for cost overruns on the years-long renovation of two Fed buildings, which are now slated to cost $2.5bn, roughly one-third more than originally budgeted. While Trump legally cannot fire Powell just because he disagrees with his interest rate decisions, the Supreme Court has signalled, he may be able to do so “for cause,” such as misconduct or mismanagement.
Some companies have said they have or plan to raise prices as a result of the tariffs, including Walmart, the world’s largest retailer. Carmaker Mitsubishi said last month that it was lifting prices by an average of 2.1 percent in response to the duties, and Nike has said it would implement “surgical” price hikes to offset tariff costs.
But many companies have been able to postpone or avoid price increases, after building up their stockpiles of goods this spring to get ahead of the duties. Other companies may have refrained from lifting prices while they wait to see whether the US is able to reach trade deals with other countries that lower the duties.
