A newspaper owned by media tycoon Rupert Murdoch has blasted Donald Trump’s choice of a new director at the Bureau of Labor Statistics after he viciously fired the last one.
E.J. Antoni, chief economist at the ultraconservative Heritage Foundation and a chief architect of its controversial ‘Project 2025’ blueprint for the second MAGA administration, “will have to take off his MAGA hat if he wants to ensure that the public and markets can trust BLS data,” the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board wrote in their latest op-ed.
Antoni’s appointment, backed by a number of MAGA hardliners, including Steve Bannon, comes after Trump abruptly canned former agency commissioner Erika McEntarfer.
His decision followed the BLS reporting U.S. companies had generated significantly fewer jobs in July than forecast by the White House, and revising its May-June stats down by more than a quarter of a million. The president claimed McEntarfer had “RIGGED” those numbers “in order to make the Republicans, and ME, look bad.”
Announcing her replacement, Trump insisted, “Our Economy is booming, and E.J. [Antoni] will ensure that the Numbers released are HONEST and ACCURATE.” Antoni’s first suggestion following his appointment has been to suggest doing away with the monthly jobs reports that prompted McEntarfer’s firing in the first place.
In its op-ed, the WSJ writes that the whole saga has done neither Trump nor Antoni any “favors,” given downward revisions to labor statistics are pretty par for the course. Estimated employment numbers were reduced by almost 600,000 in March 2024, under the Joe Biden administration, and by nearly a million in March 2009, under the Barack Obama administration.
The newspaper notes this is largely “a result of declining business survey response rates that require [BLS] statisticians to rely more on models and guesswork,” with the numbers increasingly subject to revision once “more data is collected.”
McEntarfer’s firing has therefore prompted a massive backlash from critics who’ve accused Trump of blatantly politicizing the BLS’s data reporting practices, warning that any replacement’s tenure may now be predicated on producing statistics the president prefers.
“Criticizing the BLS as Mr. Antoni has from the back benches is easy, but what is his plan to make the data more reliable?” as the newspaper’s editors put it. “Mr Antoni’s commentary at Heritage has been highly partisan, but the BLS job demands nonpartisan professionalism.”
The WSJ further noted that while the Heritage Foundation economist has indeed been sceptical of BLS data in the past, that hasn’t stopped him from using the agency’s stats to argue Trump’s immigration policies have prompted a surge in employment for birthright Americans following the removal of “artificially cheap labor” from the U.S. economy.
The Daily Beast has reached out to the White House for comment on the newspaper’s latest op-ed.
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