President Donald Trump has introduced E.J. Antoni as his new nominee to guide the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), and he already has a prolonged resume as a staunch MAGA acolyte.
That is in line with a Monday article in Bloomberg, which reported that Antoni – who’s at present the chief economist on the far-right Heritage Basis — has beforehand been praised by former Trump White Home chief strategist Steve Bannon. Throughout an look on Bannon’s “Battle Room” podcast following the discharge of July’s anemic jobs report, each Bannon and Antoni lamented {that a} “MAGA Republican” wasn’t answerable for the BLS.
“Steve, we nonetheless haven’t gotten there,” Antoni mentioned earlier this month. “And I feel that’s a part of the rationale why we proceed to have all of those completely different knowledge issues.”
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Trump fired former BLS commissioner Erika McEntarfer after the July 2025 jobs report confirmed that not solely did new job creation fall effectively under expectations, however that earlier job progress numbers needed to be revised downward after the BLS integrated new knowledge (which has been a routine follow underneath each Democratic and Republican administrations). Bannon pushed for Antoni — who Bloomberg reviews helped creator Heritage’s authoritarian Challenge 2025 coverage blueprint — to interchange McEntarfer, calling him “the right man on the excellent time to run the BLS.”
Throughout his look on Bannon’s podcast, Antoni praised former BLS commissioner William Seaside, who Trump nominated for the function in 2017, as a “nice man” and a “good statistician.” That reward is especially ironic provided that on Monday, Seaside criticized each Trump and conservative economist Stephen Moore for misconstruing McEntarfer’s jobs knowledge in a press convention final week.
“He ought to have identified higher than to try this,” Seaside mentioned, including that Moore’s numbers have been “the strangest factor on the earth.”
Trump praised Antoni in a put up to his Reality Social platform, calling him a “Extremely Revered Economist” in his signature fashion of oddly positioned capitalization, and added that jobs reviews underneath Antoni’s management can be “HONEST and ACCURATE.” The president insisted that “Our Financial system is booming” and that Antoni “will do an unbelievable job on this new function.”
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