After firing the commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics for publishing unemployment data that shows employment flagging under his regime, Donald Trump has picked E.J. Antoni, a Heritage Foundation economist who helped write the infamous Project 2025, to run BLS.
In an interview Fox News says was taped last week but which aired yesterday, Antoni said BLS should stop publishing monthly job reports:
“How on earth are businesses supposed to plan – or how is the Fed supposed to conduct monetary policy – when they don’t know how many jobs are being added or lost in our economy? It’s a serious problem that needs to be fixed immediately,” Antoni told Fox News Digital.
“Until it is corrected, the BLS should suspend issuing the monthly job reports but keep publishing the more accurate, though less timely, quarterly data,” he said, adding, “Major decision-makers from Wall Street to D.C. rely on these numbers, and a lack of confidence in the data has far-reaching consequences” [Amanda Macias, “Trump’s Pick to Lead Labor Stats Agency Could Pause Monthly Jobs Report over Accuracy Concerns,” Fox Business, 2025.08.12].
Translation: we can’t trust the data unless it’s Trump’s data.
As with climate change, vaccines, and cancer, Team Trump is cutting experts and budgets that normally work to provide Americans with reliable, useful data and leaving Americans less able to rebut the dictator’s propaganda.
And as with almost everything else coming out of Team Trump’s mouths, the thing they say they are fighting—in this case, “a lack of confidence in the data [having] far-reaching consequences”—is exactly the problem their cult of personality will cause:
The credibility of the American government’s most fundamentally important data, and its word on major issues, is critical both to American prosperity and to allied confidence.
…The U.S. government is the source of a wide range of vital data. The Federal Reserve is highly respected worldwide for the financial and economic statements it makes. The International Trade Administration in the Commerce Department is a valuable and credible source of trade information. Information provided by the Food and Drug Administration is seen as the gold standard on new drugs.
The BLS falls into this category. Data on jobs is a politically charged number; it is often a signal for decisions by the Federal Reserve, as well as by financial and corporate investors. The president has the authority to appoint or change the Commissioner. But in the past, this has been seen as a non-political position. The information provided by the BLS Commissioner simply relies on data from a wide range of non-political and highly credible civil servants. While the president has the authority to replace the Commissioner, the bigger question is whether doing so serves the national interest—or even his own economic policy objectives.
In considering the latter, it is important to recognize that removal of the Commissioner adds to already significant doubts abroad about the reliability of the U.S. and raises the question as to whether information emerging from the BLS or other agencies in Washington is based on factual data or on political pressure or partisan considerations. The next Commissioner, however qualified, will enter that job under this cloud.
This is hardly reassuring to efforts or policies to convince foreign companies to invest here (a commendable goal) or to reassure many of the world’s financial institutions to buy U.S. bonds in order to help finance the rising deficit we face [Robert Hormats, “The Historic Danger of Trump Undercutting the BLS,” Time, 2025.08.12].
The Senate must confirm the new BLS commissioner, but the Senate has shown no capacity for standing up to Trump’s previous hack jobs, so expect Antoni to take his official position soon, knock the L out of BLS, and make America’s jobs stats and the American government less trustworthy.