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This is an adapted excerpt from the Aug. 12 episode of “Deadline: White House.”
On Monday, President Donald Trump announced he would nominate E. J. Antoni to lead the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Formerly the chief economist at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, Antoni is set to replace the previous BLS commissioner, Erika McEntarfer, whom Trump fired earlier after he claimed, without evidence, that she had “rigged” the data to reflect poorly on the administration.
Antoni’s appointment has ignited a concern among economists, who worry that the longtime skeptic of the bureau could do just the opposite, politicizing the agency in favor of the president. Antoni’s already suggesting suspending the monthly jobs report. But the truth is, it’s going to be hard for this guy just to make up numbers.
Now, I assume Republicans in the Senate will lie down and confirm Antoni, even though he’s not qualified, because this is what they do now: Republican senators confirm unqualified candidates for important jobs. But that doesn’t mean he will have a green light to manipulate data.
It will be very interesting to see how the people inside the agency react to Antoni’s appointment. There are a lot of people who work at BLS who are what we call technocrats. When I was elected to serve as the state auditor of Missouri, that office was full of technocrats — people who had worked there for decades, who understood government auditing and had no political bias whatsoever. They were not trying to call anything other than balls and strikes, based on the facts and their own technical expertise.
That’s the essence of the BLS. That’s what the agency does. They analyze the data and then they report that data out. These people are professionals, they’re qualified, and I don’t think most of them will stand by quietly if Antoni comes in and tries to make stuff up to flatter Trump. He has a rocky road ahead of him.