One day last summer, Brett Matsumoto, a career government economist, sat in on a closed-door Washington ritual, according to people familiar with the matter: the briefing where the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics walks presidential advisers through the monthly jobs report before its public release.
Matsumoto couldn't have known that within hours of the July report's publication, President Trump would fire the BLS commissioner, Erika McEntarfer, claiming her figures, which sharply revised down recent job creation, were rigged.
A year later, Matsumoto is on the cusp of taking her job after a Senate committee voted 12-11 Wednesday to advance his nomination as BLS commissioner. He must still be confirmed by the full Senate. Matsumoto would fill a previously obscure role now tasked with keeping federal economic data credible, under a president who removed the last commissioner for delivering bad news.
Some who want the agency insulated from politics hope that the geeky, introverted Matsumoto is exactly the right type of person to put the perception of political meddling at the agency to rest.
Others question whether Matsumoto, with his limited supervisory experience, can navigate multiple management challenges. The reserved economist has also shown a combative streak. That surfaced a decade ago in a dispute with two researchers over their work -- and in his posts on a web forum where their work was being criticized.
The BLS was created in 1884. Now part of the Labor Department, it generates the country's most important economic statistics, including the inflation and unemployment rates. While the commissioner is a political appointee, the bureau has long been assumed to collect and publish data without regard to its political impact. That nonpartisan reputation is crucial to why global investors and policymakers rely upon it so much.
Its reputation was endangered by Trump's removal of McEntarfer last August. Economists and investors have since worried that bad numbers could bring about the dismissal of statisticians, while good ones could be greeted skeptically by the public.
Trump nominated Matsumoto in January after withdrawing a previous pick, E.J. Antoni, a conservative firebrand with no government statistics experience. Matsumoto has been detailed to the White House Council of Economic Advisers during both Trump administrations, a typical assignment for promising BLS economists. He won the nomination after impressing his CEA colleagues.
"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.
In statements provided by the White House, two former CEA chairs who led the council while Matsumoto worked there, Kevin Hassett (currently an adviser to Trump) and Stephen Miran, praised Matsumoto as an exceptional statistician.
Matsumoto got his Ph.D. in economics from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2015. He joined the BLS right out of school and in recent years has overseen a small group of research economists focused on improving the BLS's price indexes, such as the consumer-price index (CPI), the most widely followed gauge of the cost of living. The agency he would lead employs roughly 2,000 people nationwide.
Even before Trump dragged the BLS into the political fray by firing McEntarfer, the agency faced 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. "He's stepping into a difficult role at a difficult time."
For most of the past decade, Matsumoto's professional focus was narrow. He devoted years to technical refinements to how the government measures medical costs.
"My only worry was that he was so good, he was going to leave us," said Ralph Bradley, a retired BLS staffer who was one of Matsumoto's first bosses at the agency. "But he stuck around."
At the office, Matsumoto was typically so immersed in statistical arcana that some co-workers have been taken aback that he is interested in running the agency, said Jake Schild, a former colleague who has since left the BLS.
"Brett's nomination was a surprise to me and some of my colleagues," Schild said. "He never talked about any interest in jobs like that."
Career staffers guard the BLS's apolitical reputation zealously. An oft-cited aphorism at BLS holds that a glass of water is never half full or half empty: it is 50% water and 50% air.
Since Trump fired McEntarfer, the agency's interim leader has been William Wiatrowski, a BLS staffer for more than 40 years.
Matsumoto's perspective on the politics around the BLS is unclear even to many people who have worked with him closely. Few doubt his commitment to statistical integrity. While well regarded for his work ethic and expertise, Matsumoto's former colleagues describe him as introverted and socially awkward -- a potential challenge in a job that requires serving as the agency's public face.
"It will be a time for Brett to expand his skill set," said Brian Adams, another BLS alumnus who once supervised him.
Outside the office, Matsumoto has shown a pugnacious streak -- at least online.
A decade ago, a study on how maternal stress during pregnancy affects children in their later lives by two young economists, Maya Rossin-Slater and Petra Persson, drew scathing criticism on Economics Job Market Rumors, an anonymous forum frequented by younger academics . Commenters tore into the paper, arguing that the researchers erred in how they sliced up the data and that they failed to acknowledge previous work that had covered similar ground. Many also aimed 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 post that remains on the site, in which he identifies himself as the author, he said that 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, the same prestigious journal that published the initial paper, crediting the EJMR discussion with sharpening his argument.
Matsumoto declined to be interviewed for this article. Rossin-Slater and Persson, now tenured professors at Stanford, didn't respond to a request for comment.
When Trump nominated Matsumoto to run the BLS in January, EJMR members -- often contemptuous of elite academia's gatekeepers -- celebrated that a scrappy comrade had been picked to lead a federal agency.
"One of us! One of us!" one person posted.
Write to Matt Grossman at matt.grossman@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
July 20, 2026 08:29 ET (12:29 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2026 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
Comments