White House withdraws E.J. Antoni's nomination to run the Bureau of Labor Statistics

The White House on Tuesday withdrew the nomination of E.J.

The White House on Tuesday withdrew the nomination of E.J. Antoni, a conservative economist, to be the next commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

“Dr. E.J. Antoni is a brilliant economist and an American patriot that will continue to do good work on behalf of our great country," a White House official said in a statement to NBC News.

"President Trump is committed to fixing the longstanding failures at the BLS that have undermined the public’s trust in critical economic data. The President plans to announce a new nominee very soon,” the official added.

Antoni was nominated in August after President Donald Trump fired the previous BLS chief, Erika McEntarfer, in the wake of a poor jobs report.

That report found that the United States added only 73,000 jobs in July and reflected deep revisions to previous months’ numbers. At the time of the report, it found job growth for May was revised down from 144,000 to just 19,000. It also marked down June’s job creation from 147,000 to only 14,000.