Senate panel votes 12-11 to advance BLS nominee Matsumoto

Nominee inherits agency with vacant leadership, sinking response rates

A Senate committee voted 12-11 Wednesday to advance the nomination of Brett Matsumoto to serve as commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, according to the Wall Street Journal. If confirmed by the full Senate, Matsumoto, a career government economist, would lead the agency that produces the nation’s most important economic statistics, including the inflation and unemployment rates.

President Trump nominated Matsumoto in January after firing the previous commissioner, Erika McEntarfer, last August. Trump claimed McEntarfer’s figures, which sharply revised down job creation in the July 2025 report, were rigged. The firing alarmed economists and investors, who worried that the BLS’s long-standing reputation for nonpartisan data collection had been endangered.

Matsumoto, who earned his Ph.D. in economics from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2015, joined the BLS immediately after graduate school. He has spent most of his career at the agency, focusing on technical refinements to how the government measures medical costs. In recent years, he has overseen a small group of research economists working on improvements to the consumer-price index. He has been detailed to the White House Council of Economic Advisers during both Trump administrations, a typical assignment for promising BLS economists.

The BLS, created in 1884, now employs roughly 2,000 people nationwide. The agency’s nonpartisan reputation is crucial to why global investors and policymakers rely on its data. But the agency faces daunting challenges. Response rates to its phone surveys, the primary tool for tracking employment status, have plummeted. Its budget has lagged behind inflation. A federal hiring freeze last year forced the agency to scale back the number of workers who check prices in stores nationwide for the CPI. A third of the BLS’s three dozen most senior leadership jobs are vacant. Last fall’s record-long government shutdown prevented it from publishing any inflation statistics at all in October, an unprecedented lapse.

“Running an agency like BLS is never easy, but the last few years have been among the most challenging the agency has faced,” McEntarfer said, according to the Journal. “He’s stepping into a difficult role at a difficult time.”

Some who want the agency insulated from politics hope that Matsumoto’s geeky, introverted demeanor will help restore the perception of independence. “Brett is an incredibly talented economist who is meticulous and who takes a holistic approach to the BLS data,” said Pierre Yared, who stepped down as acting chairman of the CEA earlier this summer. Two other former CEA chairs, Kevin Hassett and Stephen Miran, also praised Matsumoto as an exceptional statistician.

Others question whether Matsumoto, with his limited supervisory experience, can navigate the agency’s management challenges. Former colleagues describe him as introverted and socially awkward, a potential weakness in a job that requires serving as the BLS’s public face. “It will be a time for Brett to expand his skill set,” said Brian Adams, a BLS alumnus who once supervised him.

Matsumoto’s nomination also drew attention to a combative episode from his past. A decade ago, a study on maternal stress during pregnancy by economists Maya Rossin-Slater and Petra Persson drew scathing criticism on Economics Job Market Rumors, an anonymous academic forum. Commenters tore into the paper’s methodology, with many also aiming misogynistic barbs at the female authors. Matsumoto contributed a long series of comments to the thread, many of which have since been deleted. In one remaining post, he said he had never made personal attacks but acknowledged “a few snarky comments mixed in.” He later published a critique of the paper in the American Economic Review, crediting the EJMR discussion with sharpening his argument.

Matsumoto declined to be interviewed for the Journal article. Rossin-Slater and Persson, now tenured professors at Stanford, did not respond to a request for comment.

The BLS has been led on an interim basis since McEntarfer’s firing by William Wiatrowski, a BLS staffer for more than 40 years. Matsumoto’s nomination must now be confirmed by the full Senate.