President Trump has selected E.J. Antoni, chief economist at the conservative Heritage Foundation, to be the next commissioner at the Labor Department's Bureau of Labor Statistics. Antoni's nomination was quickly met with a cascade of criticism from other economists.

E.J. Antoni, the conservative economist President Donald Trump named Monday as his pick to lead the nonpartisan Bureau of Labor Statistics, suggested scrapping the BLS's closely watched monthly jobs report in an Aug. 4 interview with Fox News Digital published Tuesday.

Officials have weighed new options for data collection, as well as new technologies that could make the process more efficient.