Our new book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The second Trump administration is on an ominous course. Trump fired the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics because he did not like a jobs report.
Trump is nominating right-wing economist Erwin John “E.J.” Antoni to head the Bureau.
According to a commencement program from Northern Illinois University, Antoni earned a master’s and Ph.D. in economics from that school in 2018 and 2020, respectively, and a bachelor of arts degree from St. Charles Borromeo Seminary. Antoni’s LinkedIn profile says he attended Lansdale Catholic High School outside Philadelphia from 2002 to 2006.
According to the profile, Antoni went to work in 2021 as an economist at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a conservative think tank in Austin that has sued the federal government to overturn climate-change regulations. The following year, he joined the conservative Heritage Foundation as a research fellow studying regional economics. He is now the foundation’s chief economist and an adviser to the Committee to Unleash Prosperity, a group of conservative economic commentators.
Past BLS commissioners have had extensive research experience, and many have climbed the ranks of the agency itself. Antoni doesn’t fit that profile. He doesn’t appear to have published any formal academic research since his dissertation, according to queries of National Bureau of Economic Research working papers and Google Scholar. Much of his commentary on the Heritage website praises Trump’s policies and economic record. He frequently posts on X and appears on conservative podcasts such as former Trump adviser Steve Bannon’s “War Room,” where he criticized the economy under President Joe Biden and lauds Trump’s economy.
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According to Google Scholar, Antoni’s paper has earned one citation, by the Texas Public Policy Foundation in 2021, while he worked there. Publications by Erika McEntarfer—the BLS commissioner who was ousted by Trump on Aug. 1, midway through her term, after a weak jobs report—have been cited 1,327 times.
Trump fired McEntarfer after a report showing significant downward revisions to prior months’ job growth. Trump supporters have since seized upon the agency’s tendency to revise some of its numbers, as well as other issues they see with the data.
Economists said they found Dr. Antoni’s history of distorting economic statistics to support partisan positions more concerning.
They cited numerous examples of Dr. Antoni’s appearing to misunderstand the same government data that he will now, if confirmed, be in charge of. In one case, he cited the rising number of Americans who aren’t in the labor force, without acknowledging the role of the aging population; in another, he appeared not to know that the bureau’s measure of import prices did not include the effect of tariffs.
“He has either shown a complete misunderstanding of economic data and principles, or he’s showing a willingness to treat his audience with contempt and mislead them,” said Kyle Pomerleau, an economist at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank.
