Washington-White House officials began the week to fight to find a permanent replacement after President Donald Trump dismissed the commissioner of Erika Mcedarfer’s labor statistics on Friday after a weakest job report of July and drastic reviews of the low employment during the previous two months.
Steve Bannon, a Main Advisor of the White House in Trump’s first mandate that influences the Maga wing of the Republican Party, is pressing for EJ Antoni, the chief economist of the conservative foundation of the heritage. Antoni, a taxpayer to the 2025 project policy rubric, has been a BLS data skeptic for a long time. In the Podcast of Bannon last week, Antoni asked Mcentarfer to be fired shortly before Trump pressed the trigger.
In an interview with NBC News on Monday afternoon, Antoni said he had not been contacted by anyone at the White House about work. West Wing officials “were still executing traps” in candidates for the Senate confirmation post on Monday, said a White House assistant.
The White House did not respond to a request for comments on whether Antoni is under consideration.
Trump said Sunday that he plans to announce a selection in the next three or four days.
“It will have to be someone who has a tremendous credibility and experience,” said a senior White House official who said Trump would probably listen to the thoughts of the Treasury Secretary, Scott Besent, the director of the National Economic Council Kevin Hasset and Stephen Miran, president of the National Economic Council.
Hiring such a person could be a challenge for Trump. By expelling Mtientefer, he said without foundation that employment numbers are subject to political manipulation, “manipulated to make Republicans and I are going wrong,” he said, raising the spectrum that a new commissioner would not release numbers that made Trump look bad.
“I find it very difficult to believe that his average person listened to Trump dismissed someone because he said he manipulated data and who has replaced them will produce reliable data,” said Kathryn Anne Edwards, an independent economic consultant and presenter of a podcast called “The optimist.”
Trump’s decision was widely condemned, even by William Beach, who was the predecessor of Mtientefer in Trump’s first mandate. He said 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 leadership could help increase faith in the agency and its numbers. But he suggested that it will not happen overnight.
“We will need to rebuild trust, which happens over time, and it happens with consistency. So again, I am not even sure that someone obtains a fair shake regardless of who is designated for this role,” he said. “Whoever is in that role will need to make the necessary changes to make the numbers more precise, and then over time, we will have faith in the data again. That’s what it is about. It is about having faith in the data.”
During the weekend and until Monday, Trump’s allies moved away from the narration that Mtientefer, a designated politician of President Joe Biden, altered the figures to adapt to a partisan agenda and towards an framing that held her responsible for the revisions of the previous data.
BLS has traditionally updated its monthly job figures based mainly on employment surveys that are late. Together, reviews for May and June amounted to more than 250,000 jobs less than was originally reported.
“For Trump to say that he is fixing the numbers, etc., I think there is no evidence of that. It could be true, but there is no real evidence of that,” said Stephen Moore, former Trump campaign advisor on economic issues. “The main thing is, who Trump chooses, if they are dating these wild estimates that are completely out of place, then people would lose faith in numbers, but I think that is already happening.”
The High White House official said that it is difficult for the Government and the private sector to make decisions if employment numbers do not reflect the current reality, and they held that problem to Mtientefer and BLS as one of relief to modernize.
“The objective here is to provide data in which markets, policy formulators can trust and people know how it is taking place,” said the official. “I think what we know in fact is that there is no transparency in how these numbers occur and why they are so bad, and you know that there has also been a resistance, from BLS to explore that.”
BLS publishes the methods used to calculate employment data, including complex formulas, on its website, and the standards have not changed since Trump was chosen.
“It’s purely transparent,” Edwards said. “You can go and download each survey that was sent … the idea that the numbers are not transparent, lies with a limestone. The idea that the numbers could be manipulated by a single commissioner, lies with a limestone.
