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Donald Trump has withdrawn EJ Antoni as his nominee to lead the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, just weeks after he picked the Heritage Foundation’s chief economist to run one of the government’s leading data agencies.
A White House official said Trump “looks forward to nominating a new candidate to lead the BLS very soon”.
The president nominated Antoni, a loyalist who championed his economic and tariff policies, in mid-August after firing former BLS commissioner Erika McEntarfer.
Trump claimed without evidence that the agency’s July jobs report, which showed a sharp slowdown in the labour market, had been “rigged” against him and his Republican party.
McEntarfer’s sacking fuelled concerns over the quality of official data in the world’s largest economy and wider attacks on independent agencies that are closely watched by global investors and policymakers.
Along with the highly influential jobs report, the BLS is responsible for producing the consumer price index inflation reading, which influences the value of everything from pension payouts to trillions of dollars of US government debt.
The withdrawal of Antoni’s nomination sends the statistics agency into further turmoil.
The BLS has struggled from a drop-off in response rates to its labour market surveys since the pandemic, along with funding and staff cuts that led to shortfalls in data collection for its inflation readings.
While its difficulties had led to concerns over data quality, many mainstream economists on the left and the right had also worried Antoni’s loyalty to Trump and his lack of statistical or management expertise posed a risk to the BLS’s objectivity and global reputation.
“Whatever you say about Trump, he knows when he’s riding a dead horse and he knows how to dismount,” said Steve Hanke, a former economic adviser for ex-president Ronald Reagan, who is now a professor at Johns Hopkins University. “He can politicise a lot of things and get away with it. But in [the area of economic statistics] it’s a very technical set of issues.”
Antoni has been sharply critical of the BLS, saying in May that the agency’s reports often feel like “a random number generator”.
He also said CPI readings taken under Joe Biden’s administration produced “phoney baloney” numbers from “the magical world of make-believe” that understated the scale of price rises.
“The public will be best served by having a non-partisan expert who believes in the mission of the BLS running it,” said Anil Kashyap, an economist at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business. “The person who held that job in the first [Trump] administration has shown how to behave honourably. Let’s hope they find another person like that.”
Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, maintained Antoni was well suited for the role.
“It is undeniable that BLS needs reform and EJ was the right man for the job,” he said.
Concerns over Antoni’s suitability mounted after footage emerged of him at the January 6 2021 attack on Capitol Hill. He did not participate in the riots.
The news of Antoni’s withdrawal was first reported by CNN.
The BLS is being run on a temporary basis by agency veteran William Wiatrowski.
The decision to abandon Antoni’s nomination will raise questions about who will be chosen to run the agency when investors are scrutinising its data to understand the effects of Trump’s tariffs and the boom in artificial intelligence on the US economy.
Former BLS commissioner Erica Groshen on Tuesday said the president’s next nominee “needs to be up to a difficult job”.
The Friends of the BLS, a collective led by Groshen and Bill Beach, the BLS commissioner during Trump’s first term, said: “We believe the next nominee should demonstrate a commitment to gold-standard statistics, strong management skills, excellent economics training, and a record of public support for the integrity of BLS products and standards.”
A White House official said Antoni “will continue to do good work on behalf of our great country”.
“President Trump is committed to fixing the long-standing failures at the BLS that have undermined the public’s trust in critical economic data,” the official added.
