The President’s Simple Message to Former BLS Nominee EJ Antoni

This is a preview of Politics Editor Bradley Devlin’s interview with E.J. Antoni, chief economist at The Heritage Foundation. Don’t miss the interview by turning on YouTube notifications for when the episode premieres at 6:30 a.m. EST on Oct. 2. 

On Tuesday, the nomination of E.J. Antoni, the chief economist at The Heritage Foundation, to become the next commissioner of the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics was withdrawn.

In his first long-form interview since the withdrawal, Antoni joins “The Signal Sitdown” for an inside look at life as a presidential nominee and the problems with our economic data that President Donald Trump is trying to solve.

When Antoni met with the president in the Oval Office upon his nomination, the biggest piece of advice that Trump gave him was “always tell the truth.” 

In the weeks since Trump nominated him for the position in August, Antoni has lived the unique life of a presidential nominee—constant meetings on Capitol Hill, continued preparation for the nominated role in the administration, and very little sleep. But, day after day, Antoni took the president’s words to heart and told senators the hard truths about our economy and our economic data.

Antoni explained why the BLS is in desperate need of reform. “The problems were starting to surface, really, many, many years ago with things like people just not responding to government surveys anymore. Those response rates have been steadily trending down,” Antoni told The Daily Signal. 

“As that happens, the data gets more and more unreliable, because you’re just not hearing back from enough people,” Antoni explained. “You’re only actually hearing from less than 1% of American businesses, and you’re trying to guess what the other [99%] are doing.”

“Of course, you’re gonna have a lot of mistakes when you do stuff like that. That’s how you end up with these massive jobs revisions,” Antoni explained. “Literally, just last month, we got the biggest jobs revision ever, where they said over a 12-month period, we overestimated the number of jobs by 911,000.”

“That literally wiped out half of the job growth in what was more or less Biden’s last year in office,” he said. 

“By the way, that’s on top of the monthly revisions, which already knocked those numbers down a peg or two,” Antoni added.

When he took that message to Capitol Hill, many Republican senators “were incredibly enthusiastic about these issues.” 

“Not everybody was interested,” Antoni said—even some Republicans. When asked to describe those Republicans, Antoni said, “I don’t know what you want to call them—old guard, establishment Republicans,” though he conceded that he hesitates to place a single label on those lawmakers.

What conservatives at home need to know, however, is that “there are many, many Republicans in Congress who, again, they got the ‘R’ behind their name, but they’re not on board with the president’s agenda. They’re stuck in a very old way of thinking. That doesn’t really represent, I think, what Republican voters sent the president here, especially this time around, to do.”

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