Heritage Foundation chief economist EJ Antoni is the perfect choice to clean up the mess at the Bureau of Labor Statistics(BLS)—the guardian of America’s labor and inflation metrics. Policymakers, investors, journalists and informed Americans rely on this data to cut through the noise and accurately gauge the economy.
Unfortunately, the BLS’s credibility has eroded in recent years due to wildly off-base economic estimates. Observe its announcement last August that it had overstated Biden administration job creation by nearly 1 million positions, resulting in Biden receiving positive jobs number headlines month after month that he didn’t deserve.Â
This mistake also led the Federal Reserve to break from longstanding tradition and cut interest rates by 50 basis points on the eve of the presidential election to boost the Biden economy. JCN polling also found that two-thirds of small businesses nationwide said real inflation during the Biden years was higher than what the BLS reported.
President Donald Trump was right to fire BLS Commissioner Erika McEntarfer, a Biden appointee, for these mistakes, even if they were the result of systemic flaws, not partisanship. Antoni, whom Trump nominated as her replacement on Monday, can restore integrity and precision to our most critical economic data agency.
Antoni was one of the first and most articulate critics of problematic post-pandemic BLS data. His expertise and dedication to reform make him the ideal candidate to ensure Americans can once again trust what the numbers say.
Critics claim Antoni is under-credentialed for the position. For instance, a Wednesday Wall Street Journal article unfavorably pointed out the number of academic citations Antoni has received compared to McEntarfer. Yet there’s literally no one outside the ivory tower of academia who cares about citation numbers.
The reality is that conservatives rarely climb the traditional academic ladder—not because of a lack of skill or scholarship, but because universities, especially in the social sciences, overwhelmingly deny tenure to right-leaning scholars. It’s a vicious cycle: conservatives are shut out of faculty jobs, which in turn means they don’t accumulate the “elite” university credentials their detractors demand.
If you only measure merit by the yardstick of academia’s ideological monoculture, you’ll always find conservatives “underqualified.”Â
Fortunately, conservatives have set up a parallel track to liberal academia: the think tank world, where Antoni has dominated, quickly rising through the ranks to lead one of the country’s top institutions, the Heritage Foundation. Antoni’s applied policy work — outside the cloistered, naval-gazing academy —is exactly the kind of real-world credentials this job needs.
If Antoni is confirmed, he can rebuild the BLS by rooting out inefficiencies, improving methodological rigor and restoring public trust through transparency. Antoni explains: “Only consistent delivery of accurate data in a timely manner will rebuild the trust that has been lost over the last several years.”
Antoni’s reform vision centers on improving survey participation by lowering compliance costs through automation and integrated data collection, and by offering incentives and rewarding participation, especially among underrepresented small businesses.
Antoni calls for price data collection to be modernized through expanded public-private partnerships, building on existing collaborations like GasBuddy and incorporating retail data from companies like Walmart and Amazon to reduce errors, costs and staffing needs.Â
Over the long term, Antoni envisions consolidating statistical agencies like the BLS, BEA and Census Bureau to eliminate redundancy, improve quality and speed up the release of gold-standard labor market data.
Financial markets, policymakers and the public are counting on timely fixes to BLS’s systemic flaws. Antoni represents a bold solution outside of academia and the federal bureaucracy to disrupt complacency, elevate standards and restore the BLS to its rightful status as America’s economic barometer.
Alfredo Ortiz is CEO of Job Creators Network, author of “The Real Race Revolutionaries,” and co-host of the Main Street Matters podcast.Â
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.
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