Shortly after firing its previous commissioner over a disappointing jobs report, President Donald Trump announced Monday that he plans to nominate E.J. Antoni, a conservative economist at the Heritage Foundation, to run the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
If confirmed by the Senate, Antoni would succeed Erika McEntarfer, whom Trump ousted earlier this month after she reported three straight months of weak job growth. The president, without evidence, accused McEntarfer of producing an inaccurate report, claiming the numbers were “”RIGGED” in order “to make the Republicans, and ME, look bad”. The BLS produces monthly jobs reports and tracks inflation.
In a social media post, Trump praised Antoni as someone who would ensure that “the Numbers released are HONEST and ACCURATE,” adding, “Our Economy is booming.”
Antoni has been a vocal critic of the bureau’s data collection. He wrote on X last week that the agency needs to “rebuild the trust that has been lost over the last several years.” Earlier this month, on Steve Bannon’s podcast, Antoni called for McEntarfer’s removal. After her firing, Bannon said he was “pushing” for Antoni to get the job, calling him “the guy that almost single-handedly took it down by going through their numbers.”
The nomination is already drawing sharp pushback from economists. Jason Furman, a former chief economic adviser in the Obama White House, called Antoni “completely unqualified” and “an extreme partisan,” warning that his appointment would mark a break from decades of nonpartisan technocrats at the bureau.
Justin Wolfers, an economics professor at the University of Michigan, described Antoni as a “disastrously terrible” choice with “few credentials beyond a long history of misrepresenting or misunderstanding basic economic statistics.” Wolfers noted that Antoni has never done work involving the collection of data or labor markets or published peer-reviewed work. “This record would be insufficient to earn a job as a junior staffer at BLS,” Wolfers wrote on X.
