President Trump on Monday evening announced that he will nominate E.J. Antoni, an economist at the conservative Heritage Foundation and contributor to Project 2025, to lead the Bureau of Labor Statistics, replacing Erika McEntarfer, who the president fired on August 1 after the release of a dismal July jobs report that included sharply lower revisions to job gains in May and June.
Antoni’s selection has quickly drawn intense criticism from mainstream economists who question his qualifications and worry that Trump will politicize government data on employment and inflation as part of a larger campaign to push back on facts that don’t reflect well on his administration or comport with his view of the world.
“Our Economy is booming, and E.J. will ensure that the Numbers released are HONEST and ACCURATE,” Trump wrote in a post on social media announcing the pick. “I know E.J. Antoni will do an incredible job in this new role.”
Who is E.J. Antoni? He’s a familiar name to people who consumer conservative media. Antoni got his Ph.D. in economics in 2020 from Northern Illinois University and was an economist at the Texas Public Policy Foundation. He now serves as chief economist at the Heritage Foundation's Hermann Center for the Federal Budget. Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts called Antoni a “stellar choice” by Trump. “EJ Antoni is one of the sharpest economic minds in the nation—a fearless truth-teller who grasps that sound economics must serve the interests of American families, not globalist elites,” Roberts said in a statement.
Criticisms of BLS: Antoni must still be confirmed by the Senate, and he is likely to face intense grilling about how he would lead the agency and handle its highly important and sensitive data, and in particular any numbers that might anger the president or conflict with White House messaging.
The Trump administration has criticized the Bureau of Labor Statistics for large revisions in monthly jobs data, and the president has claimed without evidence that the numbers were “rigged” against him. Antoni also has a history of criticizing the bureau he now stands to lead. In an appearance on Steve Bannon’s podcast after the July jobs report came out, Antoni called McEntarfer “incompetent” and agreed with the suggestion that having a Trump loyalist at the Bureau of Labor Statistics would help address problems that have result in large revisions to the data.
BLS survey response rates have fallen since the Covid-19 pandemic and economists have called for investments to improve and modernize the government’s data collection. But they dispute the suggestion that the data is rigged or manipulated for political purposes.
“There are better ways to collect, process, and disseminate data—that is the task for the next BLS commissioner, and only consistent delivery of accurate data in a timely manner will rebuild the trust that has been lost over the last several years,” Antoni wrote in a post on X last week.
In another recent interview, he called for suspending the monthly jobs report until it can be made more reliable and persistent methodological flaws can be addressed. “Until it is corrected, the BLS should suspend issuing the monthly job reports but keep publishing the more accurate, though less timely, quarterly data," Antoni told Fox News on August 4, adding, "Major decision-makers from Wall Street to D.C. rely on these numbers, and a lack of confidence in the data has far-reaching consequences.”
'Utterly unqualified': Economists slammed the idea of suspending the monthly report — and Antoni reportedly has backed away from the suggestion, according to CNN. But independent economists of various political stripes also savagely criticized his qualifications to head the federal agency.
- “He’s utterly unqualified and as partisan as it gets,” Stan Veuger, a senior fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, told The Washington Post. Veuger told Axios that Antoni's "work at Heritage has frequently included elementary errors or nonsensical choices that all bias his findings in the same partisan direction.”
- “I don’t think I have ever publicly criticized any Presidential nominee before. But E.J. Antoni is completely unqualified to be BLS Commissioner. He is an extreme partisan and does not have any relevant expertise. He would be a break from decades of nonpartisan technocrats,” Jason Furman, a Harvard economist who led President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, posted on X.
- Another left-leaning economist, Justin Wolfers of the University of Michigan, wrote on X that Antoni “is disastrously terrible” and has “few credentials beyond a long history of misrepresenting or misunderstanding basic economic statistics,” with no demonstrated commitment to truth. He added that Antoni’s background as an economist “would be insufficient to earn a job as a junior staffer at BLS.”