Trump Nominates New Commissioner for Bureau of Labor Statistics

Antoni is currently the chief economist at the Heritage Foundation.

Labor Department building in Washington on April 7, 2023. Madalina Vasiliu/The Epoch Times

President Donald Trump said on Monday that he is nominating economist E.J. Antoni as the new Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) commissioner.

Antoni is currently the chief economist at the Heritage Foundation, an influential conservative think tank.

Trump fired BLS’s previous commissioner, Erika McEntarfer, on Aug. 1 after the July jobs report, alleging that she had manipulated data for political purposes.

“Our Economy is booming, and E.J. will ensure that the Numbers released are HONEST and ACCURATE. I know E.J. Antoni will do an incredible job in this new role,” Trump said on Truth Social.

Antoni has a PhD in economics and previously worked as an economist at the Texas Public Policy Foundation. He’s taught university courses on labor economics, money, and banking.

In recent articles for the Heritage Foundation, Antoni has written on a variety of areas of U.S. economic policy, including inflation, trade, and others.

Antoni will need to be confirmed by the Senate. If he is, he’ll take over an agency that had a staff of around 2,300 people as of September 2024.

The influential agency—which reports data about the U.S. job market and inflation on a monthly basis—has faced scrutiny about the quality of the data it produces. That data impacts the decisions of stock market investors, economists, business leaders, policymakers, consumers, and others, affecting financial markets around the world.

McEntarfer’s termination from the post came after the BLS reported job figures for July that were lower than expected. The agency also issued an unusually large revision to its May and June figures, reducing job creation numbers across the two months by nearly 260,000.

In recent years, the BLS has recorded sizable changes to the previous month’s non-farm payroll numbers. While it is common for the federal agency to make adjustments after collecting more data, the bureau stated that “revisions for May and June were larger than normal.”  The revision was the largest two-month revision since 1979, outside the pandemic period.

McEntarfer was appointed by President Joe Biden. Trump alleged in his announcement of her termination that job data had been manipulated and employment numbers falsified to boost Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris’s chances in the 2024 election.

He said he would appoint “someone much more competent and qualified” to replace McEntarfer.

Antoni comes in as the BLS faces difficulties in receiving responses to surveys and faces other data collection challenges in areas like inflation.

The BLS’s nonfarm payrolls report provides monthly data on the state of the American job market. It reports on how many jobs were created, the unemployment rate, hourly earnings, and how many hours people are working per week.

Andrew Moran contributed to this report.