Subject: Utterly Unqualified
Utterly unqualified": Trump BLS pick gets panned by fellow conservative economists

President Trump's nomination of Heritage Foundation economist E.J. Antoni to head the Bureau of Labor Statistics on Monday drew criticism from economists across the political spectrum.
Why it matters: The growing negative consensus among conservative economists is unusual given Antoni's own conservative pedigree.

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What they're saying: Antoni's fellow conservatives criticized his record as chief economist at the right-wing Heritage Foundation's Hermann Center for the Federal Budget.

Antoni's "work at Heritage has frequently included elementary errors or nonsensical choices that all bias his findings in the same partisan direction," Stan Veuger, a senior fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, told Axios' Courtenay Brown and Emily Peck.

Dave Hebert, an economist at the conservative American Institute for Economic Research, wrote in a post on X that he's worked with Antoni before and implored the Senate to block the nomination.

"I've been on several programs with him at this point and have been impressed by two things: his inability to understand basic economics and the speed with which he's gone MAGA," Hebert said.

Conservative economists have cited examples of Antoni "appearing to misunderstand" the data he would be responsible for as BLS head.

Daniel Di Martino, a fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute, showed an instance of Antoni citing the rising number of Americans who aren't in the labor force without accounting for the role of the aging population.

"This is one of the many elementary errors that show me Mr Antoni is unqualified for the labor market data collection and analysis role he was nominated to," Di Martino wrote on X.
Jessica Riedl, a senior Manhattan Institute fellow, shared another example from X, in which Antoni appeared not to know that the BLS' measure of import prices did not account for the impact of tariffs.

"The articles and tweets I've seen him publish are probably the most error-filled of any think tank economist right now," she wrote. "I hope we see better at BLS."

Economists who lean left also criticized the nomination.

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