President Donald Trump said Monday he plans to nominate a researcher at a conservative think tank as the next commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
In a post on his Truth Social platform, Trump said he will tap E.J. Antoni, chief economist and a fellow at The Heritage Foundation, for the role.
The move comes 10 days after Trump fired the previous BLS commissioner, Erika McEntarfer, following the agency’s release of a report showing sluggish job growth over the last few months.
“Our Economy is booming, and E.J. will ensure that the Numbers released are HONEST and ACCURATE,” Trump posted on Truth Social. “I know E.J. Antoni will do an incredible job in this new role.”
Trump has asserted the jobs numbers were inaccurate and questioned McEntarfer’s competence. He claimed jobs data was “rigged” in order to make him and Republicans look bad. Many users of BLS data defended her and the agency’s data collection process.
The agency’s data plays a key role in strategic planning for businesses and in developing policy.
A study released last year found that federal statistical agencies are dealing with some combination of underfunding, lack of authority to prevent political meddling on data collection methodology and insufficient support from parent agencies.
Antoni has been a frequent critic of the BLS.
“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 an Aug. 4 post on the social platform X.
On the day that McEntarfer was fired, Antoni posted: “Here are the jobs revisions for the last 12 months, clearly w/ a negative average, so the initial reports continue to have a positive bias – this problem has been evident for years and it still isn’t fixed; all the post-pandemic data has highly problematic.”
Antoni’s short bio on the Heritage website highlights the news organizations that have reported on his work and touts that he is a daily guest on business television and podcasts. It says he was previously an economist at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, has earned a doctoral degree in economics and has taught courses in labor economics, money and banking.
The Wall Street Journal reported that Antoni has the backing of Steve Bannon, a White House official in the first Trump administration and a prominent voice among Trump’s MAGA supporters.
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