When President Donald Trump announced his nomination of E.J. Antoni to replace Bureau of Labor Statistics commissioner Erika McEntarfer, economists on the Left and Right criticized the pick.
Reasons for opprobrium over the choice, which was announced on Aug. 10, included Antoni’s relative youth — the Heritage Foundation economist, 37, received his Ph.D. in economics in 2020. Criticisms also included Antoni’s necessarily limited academic record and political acumen, with the Manhattan Institute’s Jessica Riedl saying, “No credible economist would take a job in which you’d get fired for publishing accurate data.”
With all due respect to (some) of Antoni’s critics, I’m here to say they are wrong. The bond market did not panic in response to Antoni’s nomination, and neither should you. While Antoni is indeed an unconventional pick for the job, he is well-suited to address the problems that plague the BLS, specifically the survey response rates that underlie its recent inaccuracies.
As a matter of full disclosure, Antoni is a personal friend of mine and a senior fellow at my husband’s nonprofit organization, Unleash Prosperity. This means I can speak to the fact that, beyond Antoni’s exemplary character, I know he will be laser-focused on the structural problems at the BLS that career bureaucrats in the building have been unable to address.
As we discussed in last week’s edition of Tiana’s Take, the primary cause of the BLS’s endless revisions to our monthly jobs reports is not political manipulation of data but a failure in collecting an adequate breadth of it. While the response rates to the BLS’s various surveys had declined before McEntarfer was confirmed in a sweeping bipartisan vote over a year ago, she failed to improve them. Crucially, she failed to improve the two surveys on which the jobs report is based, the CES, also known as the payroll or establishment survey, and the CPS, or household survey.
The 2,000 economists working at the BLS, even if they were partisan hacks, cannot fudge the economic data for political reasons, if only because topline figures such as the unemployment rate or consumer price index inflation are composed of hundreds, if not thousands, of inputs with corresponding weights. Similarly, any BLS commissioner cannot unilaterally rig data. But what Antoni can do is solve these broader structural problems fueling systemic inaccuracies in first prints of data.
Antoni has been calling out the crisis of collapsing survey response rates since 2022, long before virtually any of his peers were doing so. Furthermore, he has correctly called out the establishment survey for granting equal weight to a worker’s primary form of employment and a second job, a technicality that led to a rosier employment picture even as the economy contracted for two quarters in a row during former President Joe Biden’s time in office.
Antoni has been lambasted for calling for a temporary suspension of the monthly jobs report in favor of a mere quarterly one. Yet his calls are based on his dire warning that the BLS must improve the reliability of its data through higher survey response rates.
Mind you, the BLS commissioner would require widespread, cross-administration approval from the labor secretary, Office of Management and Budget, and Council of Economic Advisers to even propose deviating from the congressionally mandated (and funded) schedule of statistical data. Consider Antoni’s proposal a warning shot that he means business, and as commissioner, will expect a sweeping initiative to incentivize and modernize the BLS’s survey administration, as responding to the surveys is mostly voluntary and cumbersome.
Antoni has also persistently called out the BLS’s methodology for calculating consumer price index inflation. Here, his criticism of the CPI’s computation for insurance and shelter prices could be met with approval across the aisle, as the New York Times deemed the shelter index the measure that “economics nerds love to hate.”
ESCALATING CHINA-PHILIPPINES TENSIONS CRYSTALLIZED BY CHINA WARSHIP COLLISION
Antoni’s position toward the BLS is decidedly opposite to Project 2025, which called for diverting attention away from the employment surveys to establish a parallel survey to measure “the American family’s well-being.” Antoni, who is cited by Project 2025 but did not contribute to it, is opposed to the so-called “national conservative” camp that would not only downgrade the importance of the jobs report but also ignore the CPI entirely, in favor of a “cost-of-thriving” index.
Trump wisely selected an intellectual of integrity whose sole focus will be getting the data right the first time to help the White House maximize employment and make Americans’ real income gains again.
