By Lucia Mutikani
WASHINGTON, June 3 (Reuters) – The U.S. Senate’s Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee will hold a confirmation hearing next Wednesday for Brett Matsumoto, the White House’s nominee to head the Labor Department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics.
In a statement on Wednesday, the HELP Committee said it would also hold hearings for James Macy and David Prouty to be members of the National Labor Relations Board. Matsumoto was tapped by President Donald Trump to replace Erika McEntarfer, whom he dismissed last August.
Trump accused McEntarfer, without evidence, of manipulating July’s employment report, which showed unexpectedly slow employment growth and massive downward revisions to the nonfarm payrolls counts for the prior two months.
In addition to the closely watched monthly employment report, other high-profile data published by the BLS includes the Consumer Price Index and Producer Price Index.
Trump initially picked conservative economist E.J. Antoni, a critic of the BLS, to head the agency but withdrew the nomination amid opposition from some Republicans. Private economists had expressed worries over the trustworthiness of BLS-produced data following the firing of McEntarfer.
Her dismissal followed the disbanding by the Trump administration of BLS and Commerce Department advisory boards that had given the statistical agencies advice on economic data collection and analysis. There has been no evidence of data manipulation, with the BLS even reporting job losses in some months in 2025 and this year, and most recently a jump in inflation related to the Iran war.
Matsumoto holds a PhD in economics from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. An inflation expert, Matsumoto joined the BLS in 2015, and is on leave to work at the White House Council of Economic Advisers.
William Wiatrowski, a longtime deputy commissioner, has led the BLS in an acting capacity.
(Reporting by Lucia Mutikani in Washington;Editing by Andrea Ricci and Matthew Lewis)
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