Trump to nominate E.J. Antoni as new commissioner of labor statistics

President Donald Trump announced Monday that he planned to nominate E.J. Antoni as the new commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Trump said in a Truth Social post that “E.J. will ensure that the Numbers released are HONEST and ACCURATE.”

Antoni’s planned nomination comes after Trump fired former commissioner Erika McEntarfer hours after a weaker-than-expected jobs report on Aug. 1. Trump said, without evidence, that the jobs report for July was “RIGGED in order to make the Republicans, and ME, look bad.”

Antoni did not immediately respond to NBC News’ request for comment Monday. He is the chief economist at the conservative Heritage Foundation and has written a number of pieces for the think tank that are highly complimentary of the Trump administration.

One of Antoni’s recent reports said that the June jobs report, before it was revised, was a “home run” for the president.

Steve Bannon, a senior adviser to Trump in his first term, had been pushing hard for Antoni’s nomination. Antoni, a contributor to the Project 2025 policy rubric, has been a longtime skeptic of BLS data. On Bannon’s podcast last week, Antoni called for McEntarfer to be fired shortly before Trump pulled the trigger.

Multiple former BLS commissioners said after McEntarfer’s firing that the head of labor statistics does not have a role in compiling the jobs report and is only briefed on its figures shortly before it is released to the public.

In that report, the BLS reported that the U.S. economy added just 73,000 jobs in July. The agency also said it had revised the May and June numbers and that they turned out to be lower than previously announced, by more than 200,000 jobs.

The BLS routinely revises economic data such as the jobs report, gross domestic product figures and inflation data. Due to the scale of the U.S. economy and response rates to BLS surveys, there can often be lags in data collection. But that lag does not imply any wrongdoing or manipulation.