Given his past complaints about the Bureau of Labor Statistics, it was no surprise that Donald Trump fired bureau commissioner Erika McTarfer two weeks ago when the monthly tally of jobs for July and steep downward revisions for the previous two months showed the labor market was significantly softer than it had previously been shown to be. Deploying the usual zero evidence he presents to back up whatever his latest ridiculous claims are, Trump asserted that McEntarfer “rigged” the tally and had also rigged the tally last year to help Kamala Harris.
As we learned Sunday, Trump’s choice to replace her is E.J. Antoni III, a shill for the Heritage Foundation and contributor to the organization’s racist, sexist, classist Project 2025 blueprint for dystopia. As Oliver Willis has pointed out, he’s doesn’t have relevant experience for the post, and he’s an extremist partisan, not the impartial person the job demands. Trump could, I suppose, have picked yet another Foxaganda host.
Soon after the announcement, Trump posted on his social media platform: “Our Economy is booming, and E.J. will ensure that the Numbers released are HONEST and ACCURATE.”
Try to control your upchuck reflex after seeing “honest” and Trump anywhere in the same vicinity, and consider just how this alleged accuracy is supposedly going to be achieved.
In an interview with Fox BusinessTuesday, Antoni said, “Until it is corrected, the BLS should suspend issuing the monthly job reports but keep publishing the more accurate, though less timely, quarterly data,”
And, in a tweet on Elon Musk’s Xitter last week, Antoni said, “There are better ways to collect, process, and disseminate data — that is the task for the next BLS commissioner, and only consistent delivery of accurate data in a timely manner will rebuild the trust that has been lost over the last several years.” He didn’t divulge what those “better ways” supposedly are.
What exactly is it about a quarterly report replacing a monthly report that would achieve delivery in “a timely manner”? We’ll find out in November what happened in the job market in August? This approach does provide the advantage that if job numbers are still bad, Trump can just say, “old news, move on.”
Every time there’s a recession, disruption, or other instability in the economy, the first estimates of previous month’s jobs gains or losses subsequently require making significant revisions. This happened during the Great Recession and in the recessions under George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush. The same with the pandemic. Such revisions aren’t the consequence dishonesty or rigging but rather the chaos in the job market at such times that causes delays in getting solid data. Once the economy stabilizes, revisions in previous months’ reports are typically small.
Among those blasting the choice of Antoni was Justin Wolfers, a professor of public policy and economics at the University of Michigan, who on Xitter wrote, “Trump's nominee for BLS commissioner, EJ Antoni, is disastrously terrible. He has demonstrated no commitment to truth.” And Jason Furman, an economist at Harvard University and a former economic adviser to President Barack Obama, posted on Xitter that Antoni is an “extreme partisan and does not have any relevant expertise. He would be a break from decades of nonpartisan technocrats.”
Breaking things is, of course, what Steve Bannon and the Project 2025 ideologues are openly engaged in, as can be seen in every day’s headlines.
Antoni contributed with others to Chapter 18, the labor section of the Project 2025 blueprint, which discusses what it calls more family-friendly policies — a few of of which, amazingly, actually make sense. On page 588, there’s this:
Family Statistics. Every month, DOL’s Bureau of Labor Statistics surveys tens of thousands of households to generate detailed estimates of labor market conditions and price levels. And every quarter, the Department of Commerce’s Bureau of Economic Analysis estimates the change in the entire economy’s output to the fraction of a percentage point. Yet data on the state of the American family and its economic welfare are released at best annually, and generally a year or more after the fact. Metrics like marriage and fertility rates, the share of children living with both biological parents, the cost of a standard basket of middle-class essentials, and the share of families whose highest-income worker earns more than twice the poverty threshold should be measured and reported monthly and in real-time and incorporated in releases for other labor statistics.
Congress should establish an Assistant Commissioner for Family Statistics within the Bureau of Labor Statistics.Congress should require the Bureau to establish a pilot survey with a sample comparable to the BLS Current Population Survey that would publish monthly estimates for measures of the American family’s well-being, and appropriate sufficient funds for that purpose.Congress should require that the Consumer Price Index market basket include measurable family-essential goods.
Sooooo, we don’t need to see the jobs report every month, but we do need fertility data and a count of only the biological children, but not the stepchildren, in a family every month?
The Nation’s Data at Risk, an independent annual report regarding federal agencies collecting and analyzing data, warned last year about threats to trustworthiness of data:
The first threat is neglect by Congressand the executive branch. Such neglect may beunintentional but, regardless, the consequences can be dire. For example, funding for most of theprincipal statistical agencies has declined 14% in purchasing power over the past 15 years. [...] In contrast, federal discretionary, nondefense spending, accounting for inflation, has increased 16% [...]
Political interference. The second threat is at the other end of the spectrum from the first: inappropriate political interference by the executive branch that compromises the agencies’ ability to provide high-quality, objective, trustworthy information. Boxes 4a and 4b provide, respectively, some recent examples from the United States and from other countries for comparison. OMB statistical policy directives are intended to guard against undue political interference, but the fact that many agencies lack authorizing legislation securing their professional autonomy leaves them dependent on their parent agency’s goodwill to maintain their autonomy in practice.
Not a word have we heard from Antoni about understaffing and underfunding at the bureau. And don’t expect him to raise the factors at his confirmation hearing. The Nation’s Data at Risk showed that inflation-adjusted BLS funding was 18% lower for fiscal year 2024 than in 2009. The Financial Times reported that the bureau faces an 8% cut in funding for fiscal 2026 and, according to projections, will have 150 fewer staff than it does now. Not exactly helpful in producing all those family statistics.
David Hiles a former senior BLS employee who left in December, told the Times that retirements in the wake of Elon Musk’s slash-and-burn endeavor via the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) were making matters worse.
“There was a surge of retirements from people who would have otherwise been working for the next several years,” he said. “Many of these are the ‘guild masters’ who traditionally have handed down their expertise to the next generation. There are cases of a senior person leaving, and that person’s obvious replacement heading out the door the next month.”
Getting rid of skilled BLS veterans does nothing for the wide range of people and entities that depend on trustworthy statistics from the bureau. But it does serve the Trump regime’s aggressive efforts throughout the federal government to erase or dilute data. That’s because these authoritarians know that a key aspect of disinformation campaigns is killing real information.
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