Trump’s New BLS Appointee Is Vastly Unqualified and Will Inevitably Crash the Economy

By Jacob Weindling  |  August 12, 2025 | 1:43pm
Photo by United States Senate
Economy Bureau of Labor Statistics
Trump’s New BLS Appointee Is Vastly Unqualified and Will Inevitably Crash the Economy

Between his dual attacks on the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) and the Federal Reserve’s hallowed independence, Donald Trump is in the midst of the grandest assault on the fundamental confidence in the American economy in history. The horrific July jobs report was the spark, where abnormally large downward revisions strongly hinted what the private jobs reports from ADP have suggested: that small businesses are really starting to feel the pain of Trump instituting the highest tariffs since 1934 while ICE’s racist rampage across American cities is also likely showing up in the jobs numbers. Trump reacted like he usually does when confronted with objective reality, rejecting it in favor of a fairy tale that flatters the most fragile ego man has ever created. He fired the Commissioner of the BLS, Dr. Erika McEntarfer, baselessly accusing her of political bias over Trump’s bad jobs report, and seeding an unprecedented crisis of confidence in the core figures that the American economy runs on.

And now he has chosen his propagandist. Trump announced that the Heritage Foundation’s E.J. Antoni is his next nominee to head the BLS who will allegedly “ensure that the Numbers released are HONEST and ACCURATE.” This line is one clue as to how you can tell this appointment is utterly fraudulent and done entirely in service of Trump’s desire to fudge the numbers so his increasingly stagflationary economy with rising core inflation looks better than it is. Another is that Antoni has publicly demonstrated himself to be a lumbering idiot who doesn’t know shit about fuck.

An “economist” so dumb I had to explain to him how the import price index works last month will now lead the BLS, kill me

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— Joey Politano🏳️‍🌈 (@josephpolitano.bsky.social) August 11, 2025 at 5:04 PM

same guy who modeled the boomers as returning to the workforce in the millions as they age into their 70s/80s

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— Joey Politano🏳️‍🌈 (@josephpolitano.bsky.social) August 11, 2025 at 5:04 PM

Antoni has long doubted one of the bedrocks of the American economy, and every straight news writeup about him leads with the fact that he has expressed the same skepticism about the BLS that Trump has. While it is not ideal that every jobs report has revisions due to businesses reporting late and the system could be more efficient, there is typically an extremely rational explanation for these changes that we’ve known about since long before there was a President Trump. Firms with more resources report early while firms with less resources report later. That’s it. That’s the conspiracy. This straightforward and repeatable explanation is eschewed in favor of a shadowy cabal of Democratic statisticians in Trump-land. If BLS figures were untrustworthy, you don’t think the Illuminati on Wall Street would have noticed by now?

Doubting BLS figures that have driven the American economy to this present powerful point in its history is a central feature of Antoni’s candidacy and clearly the main reason dear leader chose him. I can safely say this because Antoni has very little in the way of actual professional credentials justifying this kind of serious job. He got his PhD in 2020, has written one publication (his dissertation) and it has one measly citation. Antoni has zero experience in this realm outside of being a Heritage Foundation hack whining about the same nonsense Trump does.

Trump is DEI for America’s dumbest and most shameless bootlickers. An entire constellation of people like Antoni have sprung up around the conservative media ecosystem that now has led conservatives to proudly proclaim they urinate down their pantleg in abject terror every time they think about leaving their safe space, simply parroting this propaganda network’s delusions back at them in whatever way dear leader does. If you do this shtick in Trump’s America, you can join the elite alongside him in Washington. This is what the GOP’s meritocracy of scammers looks like.

And fudging BLS data will inevitably lead to a financial crisis, as anyone who has ever built a spreadsheet for a business can attest. The entire edifice of the American economy is constructed on spreadsheets and programs reliant on economic inputs from trusted outlets like the BLS. That code takes those inputs and produces outputs that businesses and investors use to guide their decision-making. If those inputs are garbage, then as we learned in 2008 when everyone woke up one day realizing that no one knew what anything was actually worth, then the outputs will be too. This is a slow-rolling crisis of economic confidence unfolding in front of our very eyes, and unless someone stops it, there is only one way this ends. The only question is when the bottom drops out.

I’m afraid you’ll have to fire all of us, Mr President.
www.wsj.com/economy/trum…

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— Justin Wolfers (@justinwolfers.bsky.social) August 12, 2025 at 12:26 PM

Antoni still has to be confirmed by Congress, but given that the Republican Party is now populated by manbabies happy to give up their agency to dear leader so they can tell everyone they’re too scared to leave their office, there’s little reason to doubt they will reject their King’s hand-picked propagandist whose logical conclusion is widespread economic destruction. Antoni has already suggested suspending the monthly jobs report, a sure sign that hiring in America is just going swell and Trump will totally tell us about any bad news that comes into the BLS. This is a dire sign for where Trump is willing to take his delusions, and the problem for him and the rest of us is that in the economic realm, you actually have to know what you’re talking about, and if you don’t, trillions of dollars can easily evaporate from the American economy like it has in so many crises of confidence before.

 
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