White House searches for a new BLS chief with 'credibility' and 'experience'

NBC News

3 days ago

WASHINGTON — White House officials began the week scrambling to find a permanent replacement after President Donald Trump fired Bureau of Labor Statistics Commissioner Erika McEntarfer on Friday, following a weaker-than-expected July jobs report and drastic downward revisions of employment for the prior two months.
Steve Bannon, a senior White House adviser in Trump's first term who is influential with the MAGA wing of the GOP, is pushing hard for E.J. Antoni, the chief economist at the conservative Heritage Foundation. Antoni, a contributor to the Project 2025 policy rubric, has been a longtime skeptic of BLS data. On Bannon's podcast last week, Antoni called for McEntarfer to be fired shortly before Trump pulled the trigger.
In an interview with NBC News Monday afternoon, Antoni said he had not been contacted by anyone in the White House about the job. West Wing officials were "still running traps" on candidates for the Senate-confirmed position Monday, one White House aide said.
The White House did not return a request for comment on whether Antoni is under consideration.
Trump said Sunday that he plans to announce a pick in the next three or four days.
'It's going to have to be somebody that has tremendous credibility and experience,' said a senior White House official who noted that Trump would likely listen to the thoughts of Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett and Stephen Miran, the chair of the National Economic Council.
Hiring such a person could potentially be a challenge for Trump. In ousting McEntarfer, he baselessly claimed that jobs numbers are subject to political manipulation — "RIGGED in order to make the Republicans, and ME, look bad," he said — raising the specter that a new commissioner would not release numbers that made Trump look bad.
"I find it so hard to believe that your average person hears Trump fired someone because he claimed that they manipulated data and whoever he's replaced them with is going to produce trustworthy data," Kathryn Anne Edwards, an independent economic consultant and host of a podcast called The Optimist, said.
Trump's decision was widely condemned, including by William Beach, who served as McEntarfer's predecessor in Trump's first term. He said her firing " sets a dangerous precedent and undermines the statistical mission of the Bureau."
In his interview with NBC News, Antoni said new leadership could help increase faith in the agency and its numbers. But he suggested that won't happen overnight.
"We're going to need to rebuild trust, which happens over time, and it happens with consistency. So again, I'm not even sure anybody is going to get a fair shake no matter who gets appointed to this role," he said. 'Whoever is in that role is going to need to make the changes necessary to make the numbers more accurate, and then over time, we will again have faith in the data. That is ultimately what it's about. It's about having faith in the data.'
Over the weekend and into Monday, Trump's allies moved away from the narrative that McEntarfer, a political appointee of President Joe Biden, altered figures to suit a partisan agenda and toward a framing that held her responsible for revisions to earlier data.
BLS has traditionally updated its monthly jobs figures based primarily on employment surveys that come in late. Together, the revisions for May and June amounted to more than 250,000 fewer jobs than originally reported.
"For Trump to say she's fixing the numbers and so on, I think there's no evidence of that. It might be true, but there's no real evidence of that,' said Stephen Moore, a former Trump campaign adviser on economic issues. "The main thing is, whoever Trump chooses, if they're coming out with these wild estimates that are completely off base then people would lose faith in the numbers, but I think that's already happening."
The senior White House official said that it's hard for the government and the private sector to make decisions if employment numbers don't reflect current reality — and pinned that problem on McEntarfer and BLS as one of reluctance to modernize.
"The goal here is to provide data that the markets, the policy makers, can rely on and people know how it's being produced," the official said. "I think what we know factually is that there's no transparency in how these numbers are produced and why they're so bad and you know that there's been a resistance, too, From BLS to really explore that."
BLS publishes the methods it uses to calculate employment data, including complex formulas, on its website, and the standards have not changed since Trump was elected.
"It's purely transparent," Edwards said. "You can go and download every single survey that was sent in. ... The idea that the numbers aren't transparent, bald-faced lie; the idea that the numbers could be manipulated by a single commissioner, bald-faced lie; the idea that there is the capacity for manipulation, bald-faced lie."