Trump picks veteran staffer to head Bureau of Labor Statistics

President Donald Trump plans to nominate economist Brett Matsumoto to head the Bureau of Labor Statistics, according to sources familiar with the matter.

The choice elevates a career staffer to run the federal government’s leading agency for economic statistics, which has been without a commissioner since Trump fired its previous chief on Aug. 1 out of frustration with numbers that showed bad news about the job market.

Matsumoto has worked as an economist at the BLS since 2015. Before spending much of the past year on assignment with the White House Council of Economic Advisers, he had no experience working in a political capacity. He earned a Ph.D. in economics from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2015.

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Matsumoto didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Trump’s selection of a long-serving official without a deeply partisan record will likely come as a relief to economists and investors who had worried about political interference at the stats agency.

Trump’s removal of Commissioner Erika McEntarfer came hours after the BLS published large downward revisions to previous estimates of job growth, raising concerns that Trump believed he could replace her with a leader who would produce statistics in ways to favor him.

Last fall, Trump nominated E.J. Antoni, an economist at the right-leaning Heritage Foundation, for the job. Antoni was a frequent critic of the BLS who had no experience in the federal government and who had published little academic research. Economists across the political spectrum criticized the choice. The White House withdrew the nomination before the Senate could consider it.

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With a workforce of more than 2,000, the BLS collects and publishes some of the nation's most important economic statistics, including the unemployment rate, the inflation rate and the number of jobs the economy is adding or losing. It is part of the Labor Department but operates independently, relying on nonpartisan staff economists who tabulate the numbers without input from the commissioner, the agency’s only political appointee.

Investors, business executives and Federal Reserve officials rely deeply on the BLS’ figures to gauge the economy’s health and make key decisions. For many who follow the economy closely, the unprecedented six-week interruption in BLS data during last fall’s shutdown underscored the agency’s importance and the shortcomings of private-sector substitutes for its data.

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Congressional funding for the agency has stagnated for years, shrinking the BLS’ inflation-adjusted budget. Last year, a federal hiring freeze created a shortfall of staffers to do the labor-intensive work of checking prices to calculate inflation, which forced the BLS to cut back on its inflation survey in some parts of the country.

Most recently, many economists have criticized some of the statistical methods that the BLS used to fill in missing price data from last year’s government shutdown, arguing that less-than-accurate inflation readings are likely to linger for months. The BLS has said it has followed longstanding contingency plans for missing data.

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Matsumoto, whose background is similar to McEntarfer’s pre-BLS resume, would require Senate confirmation. Since August, the BLS has been led on an acting basis by William Wiatrowski, a longtime staffer.