This is Dominic Pino filling in for Jim Geraghty.
On the menu today: President Trump has nominated an unqualified economist to take over one of America’s most important statistical agencies.
Trump Doesn’t Want Good Statistics
On August 1, Trump fired Erika McEntarfer, the commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). The BLS produces the consumer price index and the jobs report, two of the most important statistical products of the U.S. government, among hundreds of other reports and thousands of data series.
Some tried to defend Trump’s move by saying he was demanding improvements to the agency’s methodology, which is in need of updating. The response rate to the employer survey for the jobs report has declined since Covid, and online surveys should be a larger part of the BLS’s methodology going forward.
Trump quickly undercut those defenders by saying later in the same day that he fired McEntarfer because he believed the jobs reports were “rigged” against Republicans. He was shooting the messenger of bad economic news based on bias against Republicans that does not exist. BLS revisions to the jobs numbers, a regularly scheduled part of the reporting process as better data become available, have gone both ways under presidents of both parties and demonstrate exactly the pattern one would expect from the random errors inevitable in statistics.
What Trump would like is a BLS that is biased in his favor. The latest proof of that is his nominee to be the next commissioner, E. J. Antoni.
Antoni is the chief economist at the Heritage Foundation. He has been a relentless booster of Trump’s policies on social media. And he has demonstrated time and again that he does not understand economic statistics.
Whether that is due to willful misinterpretation or ignorance on Antoni’s part is open for debate. But the pattern is undeniable. Here are some of Antoni’s biggest whoppers from the past few years:
The Import Price Index does not include tariffs. If foreign producers were eating U.S. tariffs, they would need to cut their pre-tariff prices so that the post-tariff price doesn’t rise. The graph shows that pre-tariff prices on average stayed roughly the same between April and June, which means that foreign producers on average were passing the tariffs on to Americans.
This June 24, 2024, effort from Antoni got a Community Note from X users. The number of multiple jobholders then, as now, is about 5 percent of those employed. Also, the share of people with multiple jobs tends to be pro-cyclical, meaning that it is higher when the economy is good and lower when the economy is bad. This makes sense: A strong economy has more jobs than a weak one. The share of people working multiple jobs was higher in the 1990s when economic growth and labor force participation were higher than they are today. The number fell sharply during Covid and has been rising since the recovery began. Additionally, the people most likely to hold multiple jobs are the highly educated, not the working poor.
This graph is misleading in its presentation, since it uses two completely different scales on the y-axis to make it appear as though foreign-born workers outnumber native-born ones. More importantly, Antoni misunderstands that the number of native-born workers isn’t increasing because the number of native-born working-age people isn’t increasing. No matter how immigration looks, it doesn’t change the fact that the native-born population is aging, both because the Baby Boomer generation makes up the senior population and because younger families have fewer kids. If you instead compare the ratios of people aged 25-54 who are employed, you would find that native-born working-age people are more likely to be employed than foreign-born ones, and the gap between them has remained roughly constant for many years.
Here, it appears as though he told his computer to generate a fit line automatically, with no consideration of the data he was looking at. The dashed line would never represent the actual trend in people who aren’t in the labor force. We should expect that number to continue to rise, again because of the aging population. The retiree population will continue to grow, so the number of people not in the labor force will continue to grow. There was a big surge in early retirements during the pandemic, which is a big part of the explanation for the jump in the graph.
This has been a recurring theme for Antoni, presenting the routine data revisions by the BLS as some kind of conspiracy in favor of Democrats. Here’s what actually happens: The BLS does the monthly jobs report based on surveys of households and employers. There is also a census of businesses that comes out quarterly. The census is much better quality data, so the BLS uses it to revise its monthly estimates after the fact. This process is performed according to a pre-announced schedule, and the distribution of errors is random over time. The same supposedly biased BLS does the revisions and the initial estimates, and there were downward revisions under Trump as well. In the linked article, Antoni presents the downward revisions during Biden’s presidency as proof that Biden was lying about how good the economy was, a claim he would never make about downward revisions during Trump’s presidency. It’s easy to armchair-quarterback the estimates after the fact, but if someone could produce a more accurate jobs report than the BLS, there are lots of people on Wall Street who would pay big bucks for it, because it would give them an upper hand in economic forecasting.
This is another common theme for Antoni: Speculating that government employment is covering up a bad economy. I’d prefer government employment to be a lot smaller, and there has been significant growth, especially in state and local government employment, in recent years. However, the overall share of the workforce employed by the government is near historic lows. It peaked at over 19 percent in the 1970s; it was about 18 percent in 1980; it was over 16 percent for most of the 1990s; today, it is below 15 percent. Again, I’d like to see that number pushed down further, but it’s lower than it has been in the past.
Those lines are flat. They do not show a trend that anyone is “increasingly” doing anything.
(Thanks to Brian Albrecht, Jeremy Horpedahl, Gary Winslett, Daniel Di Martino, Matt Darling, and Joey Politano for helping to compile and debunk Antoni’s errors online.)
Maybe you could excuse these posts as rage-bait for social media and point to Antoni’s more serious work to prove his competence. But there isn’t serious work to speak of. He hasn’t published in any major economics journal. His claims to fame include being a frequent guest on talk radio shows.
Antoni co-authored a short paper in 2024 that claimed the U.S. has been in a recession since 2022. It says the peak of U.S. economic activity was in the fourth quarter of 2021, and real GDP has been lower since then. The fourth quarter of 2021, when people were still recovering from the pandemic, had higher economic activity than late 2024? This doesn’t pass the smell test.
Menzie Chinn, a professor of economics at the University of Wisconsin, diagnosed the problems with the recession paper. The paper claims that the BLS mismeasures housing prices and therefore GDP estimates are routinely too high. Antoni and his co-author do not provide a full methodology, and Chinn could not replicate the results they claimed to find. Chinn also notes that even if you think the GDP estimates are wrong, consumption spending, civilian employment, hours worked, personal income, and manufacturing and trade sales were all higher at the end of 2024 than they were in mid-2022. And even if you think all the government statistics are lies, Chinn points out that jobs data from payroll company ADP has shown jobs growth as well. That simply can’t be considered a recession.
Antoni is nowhere near qualified to be BLS commissioner. If it was really true that Trump wanted to modernize and improve the BLS, he would have nominated someone with deep experience in economic data collection who has published research on statistical methodology and has ideas about how to make the nuts and bolts of the BLS work better. His nomination of Antoni proves that he wants a lackey instead.