President Trump plans to name economist Brett Matsumoto to lead the Bureau of Labor Statistics, according to people familiar with the matter.

The pick elevates a career employee to lead the federal government’s leading economic statistics agency, 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 labor market.

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

The Suitland Federal Center, home to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) headquarters, in Suitland, Maryland on August 11, 2025. (Al Drago/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

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Matsumoto did not 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 statistics agency.

Trump’s ouster of Commissioner Erika McEntarfer came hours after the BLS released big downward revisions to earlier estimates of job growth, raising concerns that Trump believed he might replace her with a leader who produced statistics in ways that favored him.

Last fall, Trump nominated EJ Antoni, an economist at the right-wing Heritage Foundation, to the job. Antoni was a frequent critic of BLS who had no experience in it federal government and that he 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.

President Donald Trump and economist EJ Antoni in the Oval Office after Antoni’s nomination to lead the Bureau of Labor Statistics. (White House)

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With a workforce of more than 2,000 people, the BLS collects and publishes some of the most important US economic statistics, such as 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 to tabulate the numbers without input from the commissioner, the agency’s only political appointee.

Signage for a job fair is seen on 5th Ave. following the release of the Manhattan, New York employment report on September 3, 2021. (Andrew Kelly/Reuters)

Investors, business executives, and Federal Reserve officials rely heavily on BLS figures to assess the health of the economy and make key decisions. For many who follow the economy closely, the unprecedented six-week interruption of 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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Funding of the Congress because the agency has stagnated for years, reducing the inflation-adjusted budget of the BLS. Last year, a federal hiring freeze created a shortage of staff to do the labor-intensive work of checking prices to calculate inflation, forcing the BLS to scale back its inflation survey in some parts of the country.

More recently, many economists have criticized some of the statistical methods 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 persist 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 as an actor by William Wiatrowski, a longtime employee.