President Donald Trump’s choice to lead the Bureau of Labor Statistics has had his nomination pulled amid speculation that he wouldn’t get enough confirmation votes in the Senate.
Trump had nominated EJ Antoni, 38, to lead the agency after firing former BLS Commissioner Erika McEntarfer, who he accused of overseeing “rigged” jobs numbers. Antoni’s nomination was pulled on Tuesday.
A White House official said that Antoni is a “brilliant economist and an American patriot” and that a new nominee will be announced soon.
“President Trump is committed to fixing the longstanding failures at the BLS that have undermined the public’s trust in critical economic data,” the official added.
The Washington Examiner reached out to Antoni for comment but didn’t immediately receive a response back.
Antoni faced much controversy in the media. For instance, photos emerged of him outside the Capitol during the Jan. 6 protest and the White House later called him a “bystander” in the matter. Also, CNN alleged that Antoni ran a now-deleted Twitter account featuring offensive content.
Prior to being nominated to lead the BLS, Antoni was chief economist at the conservative Heritage Foundation’s Grover M. Hermann Center for the Federal Budget. In a statement on Tuesday night, Kevin Roberts, president of The Heritage Foundation said that Antoni “continues to be one of the sharpest economic minds in the country.”
“It is undeniable that BLS needs reform and E.J. was the right man for the job,” Roberts said.
“E.J. will keep calling for that reform and serving the interests of the American people from his invaluable role as chief economist at Heritage.”
Antoni also said he supports suspending the closely watched monthly job reports from the BLS because of inaccuracies. Those economic reports led to McEntarfer being abruptly fired in August by Trump right after new employment numbers produced by the agency showed major downward revisions from previous months.
McEntarfer had been head of the BLS since 2024. That report revealed that some 258,000 fewer jobs were added in May and June than previously reported.
Trump had accused the BLS of “rigging” the employment numbers, a claim that drew condemnation from many in the economics space. He alleged the BLS under McEntarfer revised the numbers before the election to favor Democrats and presumably then-Vice President Kamala Harris.
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“That’s why, in both cases, there was massive, record setting revisions, in favor of the Radical Left Democrats,” Trump wrote on social media.
But the accusation was confounding, because the revisions would have been expected to hurt Harris and Democrats rather than help, because they showed that the labor market was worse than expected under the Biden-Harris administration just days before voters headed to the polls.
