It takes no great leap of the imagination to divine what President Donald Trump expects of E.J. Antoni, the man he’s nominated as the next head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Trump had fired Antoni’s Biden-appointed predecessor, Erika McAntarfer, on August 1, after the BLS had released a revision to the last jobs report in May, claiming without evidence that she had “rigged” the updated job report against him. The BLS numbers for May initially reported 144,000 new jobs added, but were revised drastically downward to 19,000; for June, the original tally of 147,000 new jobs plunged to just 14,000; July likewise showed an anemic boost of 73,000 jobs. In announcing Antoni’s nomination on Monday, Trump also tendered his marching orders: “Our Economy is booming, and E.J. will ensure that the Numbers released are HONEST and ACCURATE,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “I know E.J. Antoni will do an incredible job in this new role.”

And so he shall, given that Antoni’s only remote qualification for the job is a dogged commitment to the administration’s fanciful interpretation of leading economic indicators—a demonstrably false story of tariffs and tax cuts working a miraculous across-the-board recovery from an economy that was left for dead by the Biden White House. Unlike other commissioners of the BLS, Antoni, the chief economist at the Heritage Foundation, the think tank behind Project 2025, has no background in labor economics, and his social media forays into macroeconomic debates show vanishingly little knowledge there as well. Someone who doesn’t grasp basic metrics such as the import price index and who fails to account for the aging of the broader population in assessing workforce participation is now poised to oversee what’s arguably the most important set of data tracking the performance of the jobs economy.

Despite Trump’s histrionics over the July numbers, the BLS is often forced to revise past reports and projections for job growth on the basis of late-breaking payroll submissions from employers. There’s no scenario in which BLS commissioners can “rig” the job numbers since they don’t even see them prior to approving them for release. What Trump characteristically viewed as sinister deep-state sabotage was actually due diligence in reviewing early iterations of employment data. As commentators noted about McAntarfer’s dismissal, the drive to cook basic measures of economic performance in advance is another sign of the country’s descent into authoritarian squalor.

But killing the messenger who brandishes bad economic news is only half the battle for the ambitious MAGA fateful; to really get things rolling, you need to promote a practiced bootlicker into the new policy void. And this is where central casting appears to have unearthed Antoni, who is basically the economics version of Chris Rufo—a mendacious talking head who will do virtually anything to distort the basic terms of inquiry in order to arrive at an ideologically predetermined outcome. Even before Trump’s midsummer massacre at BLS, Antoni had been calling for the equally data-challenged Department of Government Efficiency to “take a chainsaw to the BLS.” In an August 4 Fox News interview, he also suggested that the BLS should simply suspend the release of jobs numbers until they’re subject to fuller vetting—a shift that, given the source and venue, could only mean further manipulation of the numbers into ideological agitprop. (This was the rare case of a MAGA apparatchik shouting the quiet part out loud so forcefully that White House spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt was forced to notionally walk it back—at least for now.)

In other social media broadsides, Antoni denounced Social Security as “a Ponzi scheme” arguing that “at some point…you’re just going to have to sunset the darn thing.” In a tendentious analysis of the housing market purporting to show that the Biden-led economy had been in recession since 2022, Antoni again misread basic data to classify housing investment figures as consumption metrics, effectively double-counting the numbers. 

This track record is so alarming that many conservative economists are already denouncing Antoni’s nomination. “He has either shown a complete misunderstanding of economic data and principles, or he’s showing a willingness to treat his audience with contempt and mislead them,” Kyle Pomerleau, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, told The New York Times. Pomerleau’s AEI colleague Stan Veuger offered this blunt appraisal of Antoni’s professional profile to The Washington Post: “He’s utterly unqualified and as partisan as it gets.” Dave Herbert, from the American Institute for Economic Research likewise wrote on X, “I’ve been on several programs with [Antoni] at this point and have been impressed by two things: his inability to understand basic economics and the speed at which he’s gone full MAGA. I can only hope the Senate blocks this.”

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Most of the Beltway speculation surrounding Antoni’s nomination concerns Trump’s continual pressure on Fed Chairman Jerome Powell to lower interest rates as his tariffs policy continues to introduce inflationary shocks; using the BLS to launder data in order to create the broad impression of sound jobs growth would be an important gain for that crusade. But the salience of BLS data stretches far beyond the sanctum of the central bank and its client base of finance professionals. As the executive-branch watchdog group the Revolving Door Project notes, BLS findings are “baked into our economic policy…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.”

The BLS jobs numbers directly affect access to unemployment insurance in most states. Cost-of-living increases for Social Security payments are weighted to the BLS’s Consumer Price Index, which tracks the impact of inflation on the purchase of basic goods. COLA findings also determine eligibility for other basic income supports such as the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (aka food stamps), Medicaid, and (in most states) Temporary Assistance for Needy Families. CPI research also grounds the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Fair Market Rents program, which allocates housing vouchers and other forms of rental assistance. If something as important as the collection and publication of fact-based assessments of real economic conditions were to fall completely under the sway of the administration’s MAGA-boosting narratives, it will place many Americans already living precariously at the mercy of whatever appeasement strategies hacks like Antoni adopt to appease the Great Leader.

Altogether, the CPI “affects the income of more than 108 million people because of statutory action,” per the BLS. As Revolving Door goes on to explain:

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.

Of course, the Trump White House has sought to steamroll the growing chorus of bipartisan critics. “Antoni’s education and vast experience as an economist has prepared him to produce accurate public data for businesses, households and policymakers to inform their decision-making,” White House spokesman Taylor Rogers says—an instance of magical thinking every bit as delusional as Trump’s conviction that Erika McAntarfer was “rigging” the data to make him look bad. In reality, Antoni’s “education and vast experience” boils down to one scholarly citation of his Northern Illinois University dissertation on fiscal policy—from the Texas Public Policy Foundation in 2021, during the time that Antoni worked there. McAntarfer’s own research, The Wall Street Journal found, earned 1,327 citations. 

Then again, most followers of this White House’s swoon into slipshod and vibes-driven data oversight don’t need to consult the scholarly record to behold Antoni’s key qualification for the job. It’s right there in his Zoom background, which pays homage to the sunken Nazi battleship the Bismarck. MAGA’s leader has found a willing and eager mouthpiece to go down with the ship.