Trump stuns Wall Street, Washington with controversial BLS nominee

The Hill

6 hours ago

President Trump's pick to lead the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) is breaking the mold of his predecessors and causing alarm among economists of all stripes
Commissioners of the BLS are usually academics or career civil servants with decades of experience in statistics and economics.
But EJ Antoni, who Trump nominated to lead the agency after firing former BLS chief Erika McEntarfer on the heels of a disappointing jobs report earlier this month, has more bona fides as a pundit and conservative advocate than he does as a statistician.
The choice of Antoni to lead a statistical division whose data is scrutinized by businesses and governments all over the world is getting major backlash from the economics profession and sparking concerns about the politicization of bedrock-level economic data.
'E.J. Antoni is completely unqualified to be BLS Commissioner,' Harvard University economist Jason Furman, who worked for the Obama administration, wrote on social media. 'He is an extreme partisan and does not have any relevant experience.'
Stan Veuger, a senior fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, echoed Furman's words.
'He's utterly unqualified and as partisan as it gets,' he told the Washington Post.
Who is EJ Antoni?
Antoni has been the chief economist of the Heritage Foundation's center on the federal budget for the past four months.
The Heritage Foundation is a right-wing think tank that produced the wide-ranging Project 2025 policy agenda. Project 2025 took aim at the 'permanent political class' in Washington, and many of its budget-cutting recommendations have been carried out by the Trump administration.
He held two research fellowships at Heritage prior to his current position and two other fellowships at the Committee to Unleash Prosperity, a conservative advocacy group led by billionaire Steve Forbes.
Antoni submitted his doctoral dissertation in 2020, in which he defends positions associated with 'supply-side economics,' a conservative policy doctrine that became popular in the 1980s. Besides stints as an adjunct at a community college and as an instructor at his alma mater of Northern Illinois University, he's held no other academic posts.
By comparison, McEntarfer worked for 20 years as an economist with the Census Bureau. Her predecessor William Beach was the chief economist for the Senate Budget Committee, and his predecessor Erica Groshen spent 20 years as an economist at the New York Federal Reserve and referees for about a dozen academic journals.
Antoni is a frequent guest on a number of conservative media outlets.
While BLS makes it a point to produce — rather than interpret — economic data, Antoni has been hitting talking points on recent BLS releases in media appearances, a stark contrast with the agency's typical cut-and-dry communications.
Discussing the dismal July jobs report, he emphasized job growth among native-born Americans on former Trump adviser Steven Bannon's internet podcast.
'There was some good news in the report, too, that we should definitely highlight,' he said. 'All of the net job growth over the last 12 months has gone to native-born Americans.'
The Heritage Foundation did not respond to a request for an interview with Antoni.
Backlash from economists
Economists aren't mincing their words about Antoni's credentials.
One economist at the University of Wisconsin refuted one of Antoni's recent papers, showing it contained basic statistical mistakes and finding that it wasn't possible to replicate its results — an academic kiss of death.
Alan Cole, an economist with the conservative Tax Foundation think tank, described the errors in the paper as 'stunning.'
'Stunning errors in a tweet are bad, but worse to do it in long form, where there's more time and effort involved,' he wrote on social media.
Conservative economists have also been blasting the firing of McEntarfer after the July jobs report showed that a meager 106,000 jobs have been added to the economy since May. Trump accused the agency — without any evidence — of producing 'rigged' data, which many economists have said is poppycock.
'The totally groundless firing of Dr. Erika McEntarfer … sets a dangerous precedent and undermines the statistical mission of the Bureau,' William Beach, a Trump appointee who preceded McEntarfer as head of the BLS, wrote online.
Warnings to senators
Antoni is expected to be easily confirmed by the GOP-controlled Senate after he appears before the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee, which will also need to approve his nomination.
Antoni's critics are waging a long-shot effort to turn GOP members of the committee against the nominee ahead of his likely confirmation.
Friends of the BLS, a group that advocates for the agency and that's chaired by Beach and his predecessor Erica Groshen, called out Antoni in a statement Wednesday, describing the debate about his nomination as 'contentious.'
'BLS now … faces the additional challenge of a contentious debate over the nominee for the next Commissioner, Dr. EJ Antoni,' they said.
Groshen told The Hill they hope the nomination process will be 'very thorough.'
'The responsibility of the Senate HELP committee … is particularly important at this time,' she added.
The Hill reached out to all Republican members of the committee about Antoni's qualifications, most of whom didn't respond. A representative for Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) said she wouldn't be commenting on the nomination prior to the hearing.
What would politicized labor data look like?
Antoni has already floated some massive changes to BLS data releases, including canceling regular monthly reports in favor of quarterly releases — a change that would alter the entire cadence of economic data output and affect nearly every private and public sector model of the U.S. economy.
He told Fox News before his nomination that 'the BLS should suspend issuing the monthly jobs reports, but keep publishing more accurate, though less timely, quarterly data,' since BLS data is often subject to revision.
Former BLS chiefs told The Hill they're keeping an eye on a regulatory standard known as OMB Directive No. 3, which governs the rules of BLS releases, for any sign that agency data could become politicized.
'Violations of that would be very unusual, and therefore indicative of something unusual underneath it,' Groshen said.
Antoni has delivered some conflicting remarks on BLS data revisions, attributing them to 'incompetent' leadership under McEntarfer during his appearance on Bannon's podcast and then noting later that the problems pre-dated her time as agency commissioner.
'I think that's part of the reason why we continue to have all of these different data problems,' he said before adding that 'this is not a problem unique to the Trump administration.'
Real problems with BLS data
In fact, the downward revisions in the July jobs report that prompted Trump's firing of McEntarfer were due to the late reporting of educational employment figures by state and local governments, along with the more pronounced seasonal effects in that sector since teachers don't work in the summer. That's fairly typical for the agency, current and former employees of the BLS told The Hill.
Political narratives aside, the BLS has seen a substantial drop in survey response rates in the aftermath of the pandemic, a decline that has made the data less reliable, but that has affected statistical agencies in a number of countries beyond the U.S.
'This is not a failure of the BLS … This is a phenomenon that is worldwide,' Erica Groshen told The Hill.
'This is a slow-moving train wreck,' she added, exhorting CEOs across the economy to make a priority of the surveys. 'There is no silver bullet. Believe me – people have been looking for it for a long time.'
Economists have been lamenting the survey response rates for years.
'Like Orwellian newspeak, [the U.S. employment report] can often mean the reverse of what it says it means. The household and establishment surveys portray contrasting pictures of employment (and both have shocking response rates),' UBS economist Paul Donovan wrote earlier this month, having noted declines since 2023.