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ej antoni
Don’t Put a Social Security Hater in Charge of Our Economic Data
With the nomination of EJ Antoni to lead the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there is reason to be fearful of the Trump administration massaging or outright falsifying key economic statistics that help determine crucial benefits.
Aug 13, 2025
On Monday, U.S. President Donald Trump nominated EJ Antoni, the chief economist at the Heritage Foundation, to lead the Bureau of Labor Statistics, or BLS. The nomination came 10 days after Trump fired Erika McEntarfer, baselessly accusing her of having “rigged” the July jobs report, which showed a slowing labor market and contained large downward revisions to payroll employment for the previous two months. Antoni, in line with Trump’s false assertions of fraud, has proposed halting the monthly jobs report entirely.
Antoni is not the sort of figure you want at the helm of a statistical agency. He has a long history of egregiously misrepresenting BLS data or, perhaps worse, misunderstanding it in extremely basic ways. He has called Social Security a “Ponzi scheme” and said that we “need to sunset the program.” His nomination has been panned by figures across the political spectrum. Stan Veuger of the conservative American Enterprise Institute, for instance, minced no words in his statement to The Washington Post: “He’s utterly unqualified and as partisan as it gets.”
The partisan transformation of BLS holds untold dangers, given that BLS data is baked into our economic policy. Policymakers look at the rates of unemployment and inflation when setting policy, of course, but by law, several BLS data series also provide for the automatic adjustment of social insurance programs and welfare benefits. Juking the stats could harm the massive number of people that make use of these programs.
How Inflation Data Affects Your Income
The most obvious way that BLS data affects our safety net is through the cost-of-living adjustment (COLA) afforded to retirees on Social Security—an annual benefit boost meant to keep up with inflation. The COLA is calculated using BLS’ Consumer Price Index for Urban Wage Earners and Clerical Workers (CPI-W), and in addition to retirees, people on Social Security Disability Insurance, Supplemental Security Income, and Veterans Disability Compensation receive COLAs. For many of the people on these programs, the benefits make up a significant chunk of their income. Roughly 40% of Social Security recipients receive more than 50% of their income from the program, for instance.
CPI data affects a number of other benefit programs as well. The Department of Agriculture uses CPI data to determine the cost of the Thrifty Food Plan, which is in turn used to calculate benefit allotments for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), also known as food stamps. The Department of Housing and Urban Development uses CPI data in the calculation of Fair Market Rents, a metric which determines the benefit amount for housing vouchers, among other applications. Eligibility for SNAP, Medicaid, and (in most states) Temporary Assistance for Needy Families is tied to the federal poverty level, which the Department of Health and Human Services updates annually using CPI data.
If Antoni is able to make inflation look artificially low to benefit Trump politically, anyone who receives any kind of inflation-adjusted income should feel cheated.
In all, according to the Bureau, “The CPI affects the income of more than 108 million people because of statutory action.” In other words, one-third of Americans have a source of income whose relationship to BLS data is written in the law. Virtually all of us will at some point in our lives receive benefits for which this is the case—assuming that Antoni is unsuccessful in sunsetting Social Security. The relationship between the CPI and your income also extends beyond public benefits: It is widely used in employment contracts, for example, for workers’ annual cost-of-living raises (especially in unionized workplaces).
Manipulating the stats is easier said than done, but if Antoni is able to make inflation look artificially low to benefit Trump politically, anyone who receives any kind of inflation-adjusted income should feel cheated.
How Jobs Data Affects Your Ability to Access Unemployment Insurance
In several states, the duration of state-level unemployment insurance benefits varies according to the state’s unemployment rate (recall that Trump fired Commissioner McEntarfer over the jobs numbers). In Florida and Georgia, residents are currently capped at 12 weeks of unemployment insurance based on their low unemployment rates (the standard in other states is 26 weeks). In April, Massachusetts extended the maximum duration of unemployment insurance from 26 weeks to 30 weeks based on its statutory trigger: that one of its metro areas had an unemployment rate greater than 5.1%. To make that determination, it used BLS’ Local Area Unemployment Statistics program.
At the federal level, we also have an extended benefits program, which provides 13 additional weeks of unemployment insurance to workers in states dealing with high unemployment. States are required to use an “insured unemployment rate” trigger, which turns “on” when a large portion of workers within the state are receiving unemployment insurance—calculated by states using the BLS’ Quarterly Census of Earnings and Wages. States can also adopt various optional triggers, all of which use BLS data in some way.
(BLS data serves as an input into much more than I am able to specify here. If you want to learn more, I recommend checking out the BLS’ Handbook of Methods. Pick a subject area, then a survey, then navigate to the “presentation” tab, where BLS often cites examples of how the data you have selected tends to be used—by researchers, agencies, the private sector, and more.)
EJ Antoni Doesn’t Care About Your Income; He Cares About Keeping Trump Happy
With the nomination of EJ Antoni to lead BLS, there is reason to be fearful of the Trump administration massaging or outright falsifying key economic statistics. Antoni cannot be trusted to run the BLS as an independent, nonpartisan body, and we should watch the data accordingly. If Antoni can rig things to make the economy look better for Trump, bad data will feed into a system that takes these estimates at face value. Inflation is low, says Trump, so your COLA is low. Unemployment is low, says Trump, so you can’t remain on unemployment insurance.
Antoni certainly doesn’t seem to care if you lose out on some of the benefits you are duly owed. In a 2018 article co-written with Stephen Moore, Antoni said that “the cost of welfare” is “disgusting” and advocated for the government to “moderately and slowly cut benefits so that, over time, some programs can be eliminated.” (They declined to say which programs.)
Much of the law governing our safety net depends on assumptions that Trump has brought into question: that our economic data is sound, and that the civil servants producing it are impartial, rigorous, and dedicated to the data itself.
The BLS is also already struggling in ways that Antoni is likely to make worse. Trump’s hiring freeze has impeded the agency’s data collection efforts, as BLS and the Census Bureau, which collects the data for many of BLS’ surveys, have both lost many staffers. As a result, BLS has reduced data collection for the CPI substantially in recent months, and it has discontinued some 350 indexes in the Producer Price Index. This decline in data quality poses its own threat to our economic data, apart from Trump’s desire to see good numbers.
Antoni, for his part, has praised the Department of Government Efficiency’s mass firings of civil servants and in November advocated for DOGE to “take a chainsaw to the BLS.” Those comments suggest he’ll be disinclined to address—or even acknowledge—the understaffing problem.
Much of the law governing our safety net depends on assumptions that Trump has brought into question: that our economic data is sound, and that the civil servants producing it are impartial, rigorous, and dedicated to the data itself. If EJ Antoni is confirmed as BLS Commissioner, we will all have one more reason to fear for our economic security.
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Trump Labor Statistics Pick Called Social Security a 'Ponzi Scheme' That Should Be Shuttered
"Bureau of Labor Statistics data is what determines the annual cost-of-living adjustment for Social Security benefits," said Rep. John Larson. "It should alarm everyone when a yes-man determined to end Social Security is installed in this position."
Aug 13, 2025
U.S. President Donald Trump's pick to replace the top labor statistics official he fired earlier this month has called Social Security a "Ponzi scheme" that needs to be "sunset," comments that critics said further disqualify the nominee for the key government role.
During a December 2024 radio interview, Heritage Foundation economist E.J. Antoni said it is a "mathematical fiction" that Social Security "can go on forever" and called for "some kind of transition program where unfortunately you'll need a generation of people who pay Social Security taxes, but never actually receive any of those benefits."
"That's the price to pay for unwinding a Ponzi scheme that was foisted on the American people by the Democrats in the 1930s," Antoni continued. "You're not going to be able to sustain a Ponzi scheme like Social Security. Eventually, you need to sunset the program."
Trump's choice for the Commissioner of the Bureau Labor Statistics called Social Security a "Ponzi scheme" in an interview:
" What you need to do is have some kind of transition program where unfortunately you'll need a generation of people who pay Social Security taxes, but… pic.twitter.com/MXL7k1C644
— More Perfect Union (@MorePerfectUS) August 12, 2025
Rep. John Larson (D-Conn.), one of Social Security's most vocal defenders in Congress, said Antoni's position on the program matters because "Bureau of Labor Statistics data is what determines the annual cost-of-living adjustment for Social Security benefits."
"It should alarm everyone when a yes-man determined to end Social Security is installed in this position," Larson said in a statement. "I call on every Senate Republican to stand with Democrats and reject this extreme nominee—before our seniors are denied the benefits they earned through a lifetime of hard work."
Trump announced Antoni's nomination to serve as the next commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) less than two weeks after the president fired the agency's former head, Erika McEntarfer, following the release of abysmal jobs figures. The firing sparked concerns that future BLS data will be manipulated to suit Trump's political interests.
Antoni was a contributor to the far-right Project 2025 agenda that the Trump administration appears to have drawn from repeatedly this year, and his position on Social Security echoes that of far-right billionaire Elon Musk, who has also falsely characterized the program as a Ponzi scheme.
During his time in the Trump administration, Musk spearheaded an assault on the Social Security Administration that continues in the present, causing widespread chaos at the agency and increasing wait times for beneficiaries.
"President Trump fired the commissioner of Labor Statistics to cover up a weak jobs report—and now he is replacing her with a Project 2025 lackey who wants to shut down Social Security," said Larson. "E.J. Antoni agrees with Elon Musk that Social Security is a Ponzi scheme and said that middle-class seniors would be better off if it was eliminated."
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Trump Names 'Utterly Unqualified' Project 2025 Economist as New Labor Stats Chief
"The cost of this incompetence will be felt by working people first," said one economist.
Aug 12, 2025
Less than two weeks after firing the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics commissioner, baselessly claiming that she had released manipulated jobs data, President Donald Trump on Monday appeared to have found a "solution" to the problem of weak economic numbers that have been plaguing his administration: a new nominee to lead the agency who, according to one conservative economist, is "as partisan as it gets."
The president announced on his Truth Social platform that he was nominating E.J. Antoni, the chief economist for the right-wing Heritage Foundation's Hermann Center for the Federal Budget, to lead the BLS, saying Antoni "will ensure that the Numbers released are HONEST and ACCURATE."
"Our economy is booming," he declared.
The announcement was made days after Trump demanded the firing of Erika McEntarfer, the commissioner who served under both him and former President Joe Biden. McEntarfer, Trump suggested, had released a false jobs report saying that only 73,000 jobs were added to the economy in July and that previous estimates had overstated the new job numbers by 258,000.
Economists say the discrepancy between the actual job numbers and the earlier projections was not unusual and likely explained by "seasonal adjustments and more complete survey responses," as Axios reported. There is no evidence that McEntarfer manipulated the data to harm Trump politically, as the president suggested, or that she did the same during the Biden administration "in the hopes" of getting Democratic nominee Kamala Harris elected president.
But experts wondered if Americans can trust that Antoni, should he be confirmed to lead the BLS, won't manipulate jobs data to support the appearance of what Trump calls a "booming" economy—one in which grocery prices have once again jumped, according to the consumer price index (CPI) numbers that the bureau released Tuesday. Tariffs imposed by the president have driven up the cost of imported goods.
"Antoni has repeatedly and unfairly attacked the agency he'd be set to run, contributed to the right-wing Project 2025 policy blueprint, and in his role at the Heritage Foundation has stretched the truth about the economy to make partisan political claims," said Josh Bivens, chief economist at the Economic Policy Institute.
Antoni, who earned his Ph.D. in economics in 2020, is listed as the fifth contributor to Project 2025, the right-wing policy agenda that calls for the gutting of the federal government. He has called for the U.S. Labor Department to be staffed by far more political appointees instead of career civil servants.
He said on former Trump aide Steve Bannon's podcast that the absence of a Trump appointee in the top position at the BLS is "part of the reason why we continue to have all of these different data problems," but Brian Albrecht, chief economist at the International Center for Law and Economics, highlighted on the social media platform X a number of instances of Antoni "completely not understanding economic statistics, being partisan hack, or both."
For example, in February Antoni used data showing the total population growth of native-born Americans to claim that foreign-born workers have benefited from "all net job growth"—but as economist Jeremy Horpedahl of the Arkansas Center for Research in Economics noted, using data on working-age, native-born Americans would have rendered a far more accurate analysis.
"The working-age, native-born population hasn't been growing for the past decade," said Horpedahl at the time. "If you use the working-age populations, you will see that native-born Americans have higher employment rates, which are also at record highs."
Having called the CPI an "Orwellian trick" used to mask high inflation, Antoni is unlikely to put much stock in the index numbers that were released Tuesday, which Yale University economist Ernie Tedeschi said straightforwardly show that "the prices of consumer goods are higher right now than they would be without tariffs."
Antoni has long been critical of the agency he's been nominated to lead, saying last week, "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."
The nominee "has never worked in statistics collection," said Joseph Politano, who writes about monetary policy at Apricitas Economics. "He is five years out of his Ph.D. He's only ever written one economics paper. His explicit, only qualifications are that he works in ultraconservative think tanks and believes Trump's conspiracies about the BLS. Grim stuff."
The criticism of Antoni was bipartisan, with Stan Veuger, a senior fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, calling him "utterly unqualified and as partisan as it gets."
Bivens warned that Trump's selection of Antoni "makes it clear that he expects the BLS commissioner to only release data that shows the economy is booming—even if it means the data must be manipulated or changed by political appointees."
"This move is undemocratic—and economically dangerous," said Bivens. "The economy runs on reliable data... Trump's attempt to politicize BLS means that policymakers and the public wouldn't be able to trust the data. If this happens, confidence in U.S. data will collapse and reasonable economic decision-making will be impossible. This manufactured chaos will reduce business investment and consumer spending, making a recession—and soaring unemployment—far more likely in coming months. Between illegal firings of public servants, starving data agencies of needed resources, and now political intimidation, the U.S. looks set to run into the next economic downturn flying blind."
"The cost of this incompetence," he added, "will be felt by working people first."
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