No Due Process. No Statement of Reasons. See, e.g., Greene v. McElroy, 360 U.S. 474 (1959). Will DJT's defamation of BLS Director be remedied? Our civil servants are not vassels and they are not slaves and they are not serfs. The President is not a King. From The New York Times:
Trump’s Pick to Lead Labor Data Agency Adds to Fears of Political Interference
Economists on the left and right criticized E.J. Antoni for misunderstanding the data he would now oversee.
On Aug. 1, shortly after the Bureau of Labor Statistics released a surprisingly weak employment report, the conservative economist E.J. Antoni joined Steve Bannon’s influential “War Room” podcast.
“Have we put in our own person into B.L.S.?” Mr. Bannon asked Dr. Antoni. “Is a MAGA Republican, that President Trump knows and trusts, are they running the Bureau of Labor Statistics yet?”
“No, unfortunately, Steve, we still haven’t gotten there,” Dr. Antoni replied, going on to say that Erika McEntarfer, the head of the agency, was “incompetent.”
Hours later, Mr. Trump fired Dr. McEntarfer, accusing her, without evidence, of rigging the jobs numbers against him. And on Monday, the president said he would nominate Dr. Antoni to replace her.
“Our Economy is booming, and E.J. will ensure that the Numbers released are HONEST and ACCURATE,” Mr. Trump said on Truth Social.
Economists across the political spectrum reacted with alarm to Dr. Antoni’s appointment — which must still be confirmed by the Senate — saying they worried he would politicize an agency long admired for providing straight-ahead facts on employment, inflation, wages and other critical economic subjects.
“I’ve been on several programs with him at this point and have been impressed by two things: his inability to understand basic economics and the speed with which he’s gone MAGA,” Dave Hebert, an economist at the conservative American Institute for Economic Research, wrote in a post on X. “I can only hope the Senate blocks this.”
By résumé alone, Dr. Antoni, 37, is an unusual pick to head the agency, which is officially a part of the Department of Labor but has long operated with a large measure of independence. Past commissioners have typically come to the job with decades of experience in government or academia.
Dr. Antoni has a doctorate in economics from Northern Illinois University and has spent virtually his entire career at conservative think tanks, most recently the Heritage Foundation, where he serves as chief economist. His work there has mostly been on fiscal issues such as taxes and Social Security, not on the labor and macroeconomic topics that are the agency’s focus.
But economists said Dr. Antoni’s background was not necessarily a problem on its own. William W. Beach, who led the agency during Mr. Trump’s first term, also spent much of his career at conservative organizations, including the Heritage Foundation. He faced criticism for his advocacy background when he was nominated, but was widely praised for his apolitical leadership of the agency.
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.
Taylor Rogers, a White House spokeswoman, said that Dr. Antoni would “restore America’s trust in the jobs data” and that his “vast experience as an economist has prepared him to produce accurate public data for businesses, households and policymakers to inform their decision-making.”
Dr. Antoni appears frequently on the Fox Business Network, Newsmax and other TV networks, where he praises the Trump administration and touts the economic benefits of its policies. That kind of history of partisan advocacy is appropriate for many positions in an administration, Mr. Pomerleau said, but not for someone running an explicitly nonpartisan data agency.
In his media appearances, Dr. Antoni has often criticized the agency he now hopes to lead. In an interview on Fox News Digital conducted before his nomination, he suggested the bureau “should suspend issuing the monthly jobs reports” because they have been unreliable. The report is one of the most important monthly data releases for investors and Federal Reserve policymakers.
Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, said in her daily briefing on Tuesday that she believed it was still the “plan” for the Bureau of Labor Statistics to continue publishing monthly jobs reports.
Politicizing the Bureau of Labor Statistics is dangerous, economists said, because accurate data is essential to good decision making in both the public and private sectors.
Fed officials rely on the agency’s data on unemployment and prices when setting interest rates. The Social Security Administration uses the Consumer Price Index, which is produced by the B.L.S., to determine annual cost-of-living adjustments for tens of millions of retirees; the Internal Revenue Service uses it when adjusting tax brackets. Investors lean on the data when weighting their portfolios. Schools and colleges around the country use the agency’s employment projections to advise students on what careers to pursue.
“These statistics are not meant to be in the service of any president,” Mr. Pomerleau said. “They’re not meant to be in the service of any administration. This is important economic data that is intertwined with policymaking in the public and private sector. We can’t be fooling around with that for partisan reasons.”
When Mr. Trump fired Dr. McEntarfer, experts rejected the suggestion that she could have meddled with the data for political reasons. The numbers produced by the bureau are calculated by civil servants, whose careers typically span multiple presidential administrations. The commissioner does not even have access to the figures until they are finalized.
For the same reasons, most experts said they doubted Dr. Antoni would be able to start skewing the data right away, even if he wanted to.
“Do I think that Antoni, over the short term at least, will be able to maniacally fudge the data to Trump’s benefit?” said Scott Lincicome, an economist at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank. “The answer is no.”
“You’re talking about a lot of very professional, very respectable statisticians that are doing this and a lot of processes that are in place,” he added.
For Wall Street analysts who depend on B.L.S. data to advise clients on how to deploy capital, having an ideologue at the head of the agency is not reassuring. For now, though, some are willing to give him the benefit of the doubt.
“First impressions here, this guy has an extreme degree of partisan motivation, which affects how he interprets the facts. But I do not think he’s fundamentally dishonest,” said Preston Caldwell, senior U.S. economist for the investment research service Morningstar. “I do not think he’s going to come in there as a wrecking ball destroying the bureau’s ability to produce good data.”
But economists said there are ways that a politically minded B.L.S. commissioner could influence the numbers over time in subtle or less subtle ways. They said they would be watching for signs of trouble: unexplained turnover at senior levels, methodological changes that get made without clear documentation, numbers that diverge consistently from private-sector measures.
Stephen Moore, the Heritage Foundation economist who recommended Mr. Antoni to Mr. Trump, said that while Mr. Antoni is a rising star in the conservative movement, he is not someone who would try to manipulate data for the president’s political gain.
“He’s going to be assessed solely on the basis of whether or not these jobs reports are reliable and accurate, and that’s why he’s not going to cook the books,” Mr. Moore said. “It would be exposed quickly, and then he would be discredited.”
But the damage to the agency’s credibility may already have been done. Many Americans were already skeptical that government statistics were truly free of political influence, and Mr. Trump’s decision to fire Dr. McEntarfer in response to a bad jobs report only reinforced those doubts.
“The only way Trump could assuage fears of partisan bias would be to appoint someone who has a sterling record of nonpartisan, perhaps even Trump-critical analysis, and he did the opposite,” Mr. Lincicome said.
Dr. Beach, the former B.L.S. commissioner, said Dr. Antoni will face serious challenges convincing the public that he is independent, particularly given the way his predecessor was fired on Aug. 1.
“This is a bigger job than it was on July 31,” he said.
But Dr. Beach said he faced some of the same skepticism when Mr. Trump nominated him to run the agency during his first term. He said he overcame that in part by making it clear at the outset that, no matter what policy positions he had taken in the past, he understood that his new role required him to operate free from political influence.
He recalled being asked during his confirmation process whether he would protect the agency from Mr. Trump’s influence.
“I said, ‘Look, I will stand between any politician and B.L.S.,’” he recalled. “They’ll have to get through me to get to B.L.S.”
Dr. Antoni’s first stop in the Senate will be the Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions. Its Republican chairman, Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, had raised concerns with the large payroll employment revisions last year and welcomed the dismissal of Dr. McEntarfer.
“We need a B.L.S. commissioner committed to producing accurate, unbiased economic information to the American people,” his office said. “Chairman Cassidy looks forward to meeting with Dr. Antoni to discuss how he will accomplish this.”
Senator Patty Murray of Washington, the committee’s Democratic ranking member, was less sanguine.
“Any senator who votes to confirm this partisan hack is voting to shred the integrity of our nation’s best economic and jobs data, which underpin our entire economy,” she wrote in a statement. “If E.J. Antoni gets confirmed, I hope Republicans like playing make-believe, because that’s all B.L.S. data will become.”
Tony Romm contributed reporting.
Ben Casselman is the chief economics correspondent for The Times. He has reported on the economy for nearly 20 years.
Alan Rappeport is an economic policy reporter for The Times, based in Washington. He covers the Treasury Department and writes about taxes, trade and fiscal matters.
Lydia DePillis reports on the American economy for The Times. She has been a journalist since 2009, and can be reached at lydia.depillis@nytimes.com.
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