White House searches for a new BLS chief with ‘credibility’ and ‘experience’
Washington – White House officials began to rush the week to find a permanent replacement after President Donald Trump dismissed the commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics on Friday, Erika McENTARfer, following a lower than expected July job report and Drasts’ Draft Draft Revisions for the previous two months.
Steve Bannon, a Senior White House advisor to Trump’s first term, influencing the Maga du Gop wing, pushes hard for EJ Antoni, the chief economist of the Conservative Heritage Foundation. Antoni, a contributor to the 2025 project political section, has been long -standing BLS data. On the Bannon podcast last week, Antoni asked that Mcentarfer be dismissed shortly before Trump attracts relaxation.
In an interview with NBC News on Monday afternoon, Antoni said he had not been contacted by anyone in the White House about work. West Wing officials were “still traps” on candidates for the position confirmed by the Senate on Monday, said an assistant from the White House.
The White House did not respond to a request for a comment on the question of whether Antoni is being studied.
Trump said on Sunday that he planned to announce a choice in the next three or four days.
“It will be to have to be someone who has enormous credibility and experience,” said a senior White House official who noted that Trump would be likely to listen to the thoughts of the Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent, Director of the National Economic Council Kevin Hassett and Stephen Miran, President of the National Economic Council.
The hiring of such a person could be a challenge for Trump. Opposing MCENTARFER, he founded baseless that the number of jobs was subject to political manipulation – “faked in order to make Republicans, and I seem bad,” he said – raising the spectrum that a new commissioner would not release the figures that made Trump had badly appeared.
“I find it so difficult to believe that your average person hears Trump dismissed someone because he said that he had manipulated data and that he replaced them would be able to produce trustworthy data,” said Kathryn Anne Edwards, independent economic consultant and host of a podcast called “The Optimist”.
Trump’s decision was widely sentenced, notably by William Beach, who was Mcentarfer’s predecessor during Trump’s first term. He said that his shot “establishes a dangerous precedent and undermines the statistical mission of the office”.
In his interview with NBC News, Antoni said that the new management could help increase faith in the agency and its number. But he suggested that this will not happen overnight.
“We are going to have to rebuild confidence, which happens over time, and that happens with consistency. Again, I am not even sure that anyone will shake just, no matter who is named to this role,” he said. “The one who participates in this role will have to make the necessary changes to make the figures more precise, then over time, we will once again have confidence in the data. This is ultimately what it is. It is a question of having confidence in the data.”
During the weekend and Monday, Trump’s allies moved away from the story that Mcentarfer, a policy of President Joe Biden, changed personalities to suit a partisan program and a framing that held her responsible for previous data revisions.
BLS has traditionally updated its monthly job figures based mainly on employment surveys that arrive late. Together, the revisions for May and June amounted to more than 250,000 jobs less than those initially reported.
“For Trump to say that she is repairing the figures and so on, I think there is no evidence of this. It could be true, but there is no real evidence of this,” said Stephen Moore, a former Trump campaign advisor on economic issues. “The main thing is that the one who chooses Trump, if they go out with these wild estimates which are completely out of the basis, then people would lose confidence in the figures, but I think it already happens.”
The senior White House official said that it was difficult for the government and the private sector to make decisions if the number of jobs does not reflect current reality – and has pinned this problem on Mcentarfer and BLS as a reluctance to modernize.
“The objective here is to provide data on which markets, decision -makers can count and people know how it is produced,” said the manager. “I think what we actually know is that there is no transparency in the way these figures are produced and why they are so bad, and you know that there has also been a BLS resistance to really explore this.”
BLS publishes the methods he uses to calculate employment data, including complex formulas, on his website, and standards have not changed since the election of Trump.
“It’s purely transparent,” said Edwards. “You can go and download each survey that has been sent. … The idea that the numbers are not transparent – ball lie.
