President Donald Trump is reportedly considering a conservative activist who wrongly predicted a recession in 2024 to lead the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
The Wall Street Journal reported on Sunday that EJ Antoni, chief economist for the right-wing Heritage Foundation think tank, is the frontrunner to lead the embattled agency. Antoni was a contributor to Project 2025, Trump’s blueprint for taking over the U.S. government.
Trump fired Dr. Erika McEntarfer, the Senate-confirmed leader of the agency, in retaliation for a jobs report showing the job market beginning to stagnate since he began implementing his tariffs, with only 73,000 jobs added in July—far below the expected 110,000. The report also showed downward job number revisions for May and June.
President Donald Trump announces his tariffs, which have had devastating impacts on the U.S. economy.
Instead of admitting that he made a mistake or changing course, Trump has decided to repeatedly push a twisted and false conspiracy theory alleging that jobs numbers are being manipulated.
Antoni’s candidacy for the top BLS job has the open support of former Trump chief of staff and right-wing conspiracy theorist Steve Bannon.
“EJ Antoni as the new head of Bureau of Labor Statistics. That's what we're pushing,” Bannon said last week on his podcast, on which Antoni previously appeared to call for McEntarfer’s ouster.
After BLS released a revised jobs report on the state of the economy in August 2024, Antoni declared that it was the sign of a recession.
“Wall Street is increasingly waking up to the fact that the economy post-COVID has never been as good as the government bean counters claimed, and a recession may have already begun,” he told the right-wing Daily Caller.
Similarly, after the passage of the American Rescue Plan in 2021, Antoni wrote an analysis arguing that it would cause millions of jobs to be lost.
He was extremely wrong on both counts.
At the end of his 4-year term, President Joe Biden added 16.6 million jobs to the economy after signing several key pieces of legislation to stimulate the economy, including the Rescue Plan, the Infrastructure Act, the CHIPS and Science Act, and the Inflation Reduction Act. Most Republicans—and the Heritage Foundation—opposed those bills.
The economy that Trump inherited from Biden was stabilized after the height of the coronavirus pandemic under Trump and even growing. But now that costs are being artificially increased because of Trump’s tariffs, that growth is under significant threat.
Trump’s tariffs are already hurting the economy, and now someone who couldn’t see economic improvements coming when they were well on their way is likely to lead the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
What could go wrong?
