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“President Donald Trump [last] Monday said he was nominating economist E.J. Antoni as the new Bureau of Labor Statistics commissioner, 10 days after firing the agency's previous leader [Erika McEntarfer] following a weak scorecard of the job market… Antoni is currently the chief economist at the influential conservative think tank Heritage Foundation. He has been critical of the BLS, the Labor Department's statistical agency.” Reuters
Here’s our previous coverage of the BLS, and our Weekly Spotlight explaining BLS jobs data. The Flip Side
The left argues that Antoni’s appointment will reduce trust in US economic data.
“Antoni, who contributed to Project 2025, has a résumé that’s thin on qualifications. Five years ago, according to his LinkedIn profile, he completed his doctorate in economics at Northern Illinois University, after a short stint teaching at Sauk Valley Community College. His only scholarly publication — ever — appears to be his doctoral thesis, which has been cited by other economists a grand total of one time…
“Antoni has shown ignorance of basic economic data, including in a recent social-media post supporting Trump’s tariffs, in which he appeared to not grasp that a major index of import prices did not include tariffs in its published data…
“By contrast, McEntarfer received her doctorate from Virginia Tech in 2002, then worked as an economist in a variety of roles at the Census Bureau—under both Republican and Democratic presidents—as well as in top jobs at the Treasury Department and the White House Council of Economic Advisers… During her time in public service—not in academia—she produced at least 44 publications, which have been cited by other scholars 1,327 times.”
Brian Klaas, The Atlantic
“In countries run by populists, there often comes a moment when empirical reality, as reflected in official economic statistics, clashes with the regime’s rhetoric, and something gives. Argentina provides a famous example. In 2007, as the inflation rate was rising sharply, the government of Néstor Kirchner… fired a top official at the national statistics agency and appointed a loyalist, under whom the agency reported inflation figures that were widely discredited…
“If an Argentina-style outcome seems unlikely in the short term, there is still reason to be alarmed at Trump’s latest effort to bully government agencies that have long operated without political meddling… In attacking the Federal Reserve, and now the B.L.S., Trump is undermining the institutional foundations on which business confidence, American financial dominance, and the reserve status of the dollar are based.”
John Cassidy, New Yorker
“The salience of BLS data stretches far beyond the sanctum of the central bank and its client base of finance professionals… The BLS jobs numbers directly affect access to unemployment insurance in most states. Cost-of-living increases for Social Security payments are weighted to the BLS’s Consumer Price Index… [Cost-of-Living Adjustments] also determine eligibility for other basic income supports…
“If something as important as the collection and publication of fact-based assessments of real economic conditions were to fall completely under the sway of the administration’s MAGA-boosting narratives, it will place many Americans already living precariously at the mercy of whatever appeasement strategies hacks like Antoni adopt to appease the Great Leader.”
Chris Lehmann, The Nation
The right is divided.
The right is divided.
“The primary cause of the BLS’s endless revisions to our monthly jobs reports is not political manipulation of data but a failure in collecting an adequate breadth of it. While the response rates to the BLS’s various surveys had declined before McEntarfer was confirmed in a sweeping bipartisan vote over a year ago, she failed to improve them. Crucially, she failed to improve the two surveys on which the jobs report is based…
“The 2,000 economists working at the BLS, even if they were partisan hacks, cannot fudge the economic data for political reasons, if only because topline figures such as the unemployment rate or consumer price index inflation are composed of hundreds, if not thousands, of inputs with corresponding weights. Similarly, any BLS commissioner cannot unilaterally rig data. But what Antoni can do is solve these broader structural problems fueling systemic inaccuracies in first prints of data…
“Antoni has been calling out the crisis of collapsing survey response rates since 2022, long before virtually any of his peers were doing so. Furthermore, he has correctly called out the establishment survey for granting equal weight to a worker’s primary form of employment and a second job, a technicality that led to a rosier employment picture even as the economy contracted for two quarters in a row during former President Joe Biden’s time in office.”
Tiana Lowe Doescher, Washington Examiner
“Critics claim Antoni is under-credentialed for the position… Yet there’s literally no one outside the ivory tower of academia who cares about citation numbers. The reality is that conservatives rarely climb the traditional academic ladder…
“Fortunately, conservatives have set up a parallel track to liberal academia: the think tank world, where Antoni has dominated, quickly rising through the ranks to lead one of the country’s top institutions, The Heritage Foundation. Antoni’s applied policy work—outside the cloistered, naval-gazing academy—is exactly the kind of real-world credentials this job needs.”
Alfredo Ortiz, Daily Signal
Others argue, “Antoni presents the downward revisions during Biden’s presidency as proof that Biden was lying about how good the economy was, a claim he would never make about downward revisions during Trump’s presidency. It’s easy to armchair-quarterback the estimates after the fact, but if someone could produce a more accurate jobs report than the BLS, there are lots of people on Wall Street who would pay big bucks for it, because it would give them an upper hand in economic forecasting…
“Antoni is nowhere near qualified to be BLS commissioner. If it was really true that Trump wanted to modernize and improve the BLS, he would have nominated someone with deep experience in economic data collection who has published research on statistical methodology and has ideas about how to make the nuts and bolts of the BLS work better. His nomination of Antoni proves that he wants a lackey instead.”
Dominic Pino, National Review
