I subscribe to the Wall Street Journal, and have for decades now.
Yikes. Decades.
Given how expensive it is--about $40/month--that means I have spent many thousands of dollars on the content.
While I have never expected that the news side of the paper would be anything but liberal-leaning--the conservative reputation is based on the rightward economic tilt of its Opinion Page--I have expected it to be less ridiculous than The New York Times or The Washington Post.
That expectation is misplaced these days.
The Partisan Economist Trump Wants to Oversee the Nation’s Data
— John Bussey (@johncbussey) August 13, 2025
E.J. Antoni lacks the research record of past Bureau of Labor Statistics leaders but has a history of backing Trump’s narrative on the economy.https://t.co/SbMyG29aGd via @WSJ
My friend Vince Coglianese asked me to take a look at the coverage of Trump's appointment to oversee the Bureau of Labor Statistics E.J. Antoni, so of course I obliged.
And where better to start than The Wall Street Journal, whose coverage of financial markets is supposed to be better than most, right?
Ugh. The story was so slanted that I wound up learning nothing other than that the writer, Paul Kiernan, hates Antoni and Trump. Seriously, it's THAT bad. To call it biased is an insult to biased reporting. It is sneering, condescending, and implies that Antoni has lied about his credentials (without evidence). The ratio of basic information to insulting implications is pitiful.
And it is lazy. Really lazy.
President Trump this week tapped Antoni to run the agency whose data and methodologies he has long criticized, especially when it produces numbers that Trump doesn’t like. He recently proposed suspending the monthly jobs report, one of the most important data releases for the economy and markets. On Tuesday, a White House official noted that Antoni made the comment before he knew he was going to be chosen and that his comments don’t reflect official BLS policy.
If confirmed by the Senate, Antoni would run a 141-year-old agency staffed by around 2,000 economists, statisticians and other officials. The BLS has a long record of independence and nonpartisanship that economists and investors say is critical to the credibility of U.S. economic data.
President Trump fired the head of the BLS, claiming manipulated jobs numbers after a report of slowed hiring. While revisions were more dramatic than usual, these numbers are always revised. WSJ explains.
According to a commencement program from Northern Illinois University, Antoni earned a master’s and Ph.D. in economics from that school in 2018 and 2020, respectively, and a bachelor of arts degree from St. Charles Borromeo Seminary. Antoni’s LinkedIn profile says he attended Lansdale Catholic High School outside Philadelphia from 2002 to 2006.
According to the profile, Antoni went to work in 2021 as an economist at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a conservative think tank in Austin that has sued the federal government to overturn climate-change regulations. The following year, he joined the conservative Heritage Foundation as a research fellow studying regional economics. He is now the foundation’s chief economist and an adviser to the Committee to Unleash Prosperity, a group of conservative economic commentators.
"According to.. According to..." Well, did he or didn't he get these degrees, and what possible relevance does where he went to high school have?
The answer is that Kiernan doesn't find Antoni's credentials up to snuff.
It is always about the credentials with liberals, isn't it? It is an obsession. Stick Harvard after a name and they can spout nonsense all day long. Go to NIU and you are a dunce.
Kiernan, by the way, doesn't have a degree in economics, although that is his beat. He went to UNC-Chapel Hill and got a degree in journalism. Does that make him unqualified to cover economic issues?
No, if he knows his stuff and covers the issues well, he should. If he doesn't, and just bloviates about his opinions, he might as well be a sophomore in college BS-ing in the lounge as he smokes weed. Guess which I think he should be doing.
The fears that Trump is trying to install a toady in the BLS position are not wholly off-base. Obviously, the US government should be putting out reliable labor statistics--trillions of dollars are invested based on the reliability of those numbers, and successful economies--of which there are far too few in the world--are built on trust. Phony statistics are dangerous.
But there is a problem with all this storm and strife about Trump firing the BLS Commissioner--she sucked at her job and was clearly juking the numbers to help Biden. That isn't an idle accusation. Month after month, she reported outstanding job numbers, and month after month, they were wildly wrong.
Not wrong by a little bit, either. Wrong by HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS of jobs. During an election year. Either she was stunningly incompetent, or she was manipulating the numbers to benefit Biden.
So the claim that she was a neutral technocrat and Antoni is nothing but a Trump stooge is based on an initial falsehood: that the numbers have been reliable because partisanship has not been influencing the statistics, and Trump is upending decades of tradition and threatening our economy.
There's another fallacy at work here: that Antoni's academic skills are not up to the task--he has no academic research background. To which I say: that is a good thing, not a bad one. Or at least it could be. The Commissioner of the BLS doesn't actually crunch the numbers--about 2000 economists and statisticians do. Given the known profile of federal workers, it is a near certainty that they are highly partisan Democrats.
If confirmed by the Senate, Antoni would run a 141-year-old agency staffed by around 2,000 economists, statisticians and other officials. The BLS has a long record of independence and nonpartisanship that economists and investors say is critical to the credibility of U.S. economic data.
What the BLS needs is not another statistician, but somebody who can clean up a big, stinking mess. The received wisdom in DC and New York may be that Pete Buttigieg is a massively competent and thoughtful manager who ran our transportation system with the precision of an atomic clock and any Republican is a partisan hack, but experience shows that the people who believe this are partisan hacks with the integrity of a snake.
According to Google Scholar, Antoni’s paper has earned one citation, by the Texas Public Policy Foundation in 2021, while he worked there. Publications by Erika McEntarfer—the BLS commissioner who was ousted by Trump on Aug. 1, midway through her term, after a weak jobs report—have been cited 1,327 times.
Trump fired McEntarfer after a report showing significant downward revisions to prior months’ job growth. Trump supporters have since seized upon the agency’s tendency to revise some of its numbers, as well as other issues they see with the data.
“It’s not a matter of making the numbers look good, it’s a matter of them being accurate,” Antoni said on Bannon’s Aug. 1 show after McEntarfer’s dismissal. “The models and the methodologies need to be revised.”
"Seized." For God's sake, man, find another propaganda word. That one is played out. And "some" revisions? Being off by hundreds of thousands of jobs is not exactly brilliant work.
But at least she has citations!
This is lazy, ridiculous reporting, unworthy of publication in a local free newspaper alongside the advertisements for escorts.
Do I know Antoni will be an outstanding choice? You never know until you see the results. If Antoni jukes the numbers to favor Trump, or just puts out a shoddy product, the answer will be no. But it's hard to see how he could do much worse than before, and quoting the number of academic citations is only convincing to people who believe that Harvard and Yale are doing a masterful job of preserving academic integrity and pursuing truth without fear or favor.
In other words, idiots.
