NEWS: Senator Blunt Rochester Questions Key Department of Labor Nominees

"I served as Delaware Secretary of Labor and so, to me, the data is so important."

Click here to watch Senator Blunt Rochester's remarks.

U.S. Senator Lisa Blunt Rochester (D-Del.), a member of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions, today questioned President Trump's nominee for the Commissioner of Labor Statistics as well as two nominees for the National Labor Relations Board. These roles are critical to addressing national unemployment statistics and ensuring accurate, transparent data collection. Senator Blunt Rochester's questions focused on the importance of considering bipartisan nominees and the independence and modernization of the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS).

Nominees Included:

• Brett Matsumoto to be Commissioner of Labor Statistics, Department of Labor
• James Macy to be a Member of the National Labor Relations Board
• David Prouty to be a Member of the National Labor Relations Board

Senator Blunt Rochester's full remarks and exchange can be found here. A key excerpt is included below:

Senator Blunt Rochester: "As commissioner, in this digital age with new technologies and complex labor market challenges, including the impacts of AI, how would you approach BLS modernization? Are there things that you would do differently from past commissioners?"

Mr. Matsumoto: "So I think given the resource constraints faced by the agency, I am very interested in the potential use of these new tools to help with the work at the agency, and now, of course, there are a lot of challenges to using these tools in a statistical agency, where you're dealing with non-public, personally identifiable data, pre-release data, and so certainly I view … what my role as commissioner would be is just to help whatever the barriers are to the adoption of these tools to address them, so that the staff has access to them."