Trump’s new statistics chief is not qualified to do the job

The internet has been quick to dig into the professional history of EJ Antoni, President Donald Trump’s pick to lead the US Bureau of Labour Statistics. It doesn’t take long. Now the chief economist for the Heritage Foundation, he got his doctorate just five years ago and has no publications or citations of note. He has no experience with large public surveys, no research about survey methodology, and no history of managing large organisations such as the 2000 people who work at the bureau. Unusually for an economist, he appears not to have a strong grasp of how recessions work.

Ultimately, however, Antoni himself is uninteresting. He’s just another unqualified Trump nominee. His nomination is worth paying attention to, however, because it illustrates the twin perils facing the economy: the coming slowdown, and a party that refuses to acknowledge it.

If anyone needed further proof of that slowdown, it came in the jobs numbers that got the last bureau commissioner fired. The US economy added an average of just 35,000 jobs over the last three months. This came on the heels of a GDP report that showed both household spending and business investment growing at half the pace of last year. Meanwhile, prices are still rising above the target rate of 2 per cent.

This is a historically dangerous combination, brought on by tariffs. There is no nightmare for the modern economy quite like slow growth and rising prices – the dreaded stagflation. And the US is closer to stagflation now than it has been in 40 years.

But that’s only half the problem – the less scary half, in fact.

After all, it’s not uncommon for economies to slow down or even go through recessions. When they do, a machinery of co-ordinated policy is put into gear to provide relief to suffering citizens. The goal is to prevent an acceleration of the downturn.

Congress has expanded unemployment benefits during every recession since 1957. As the financial crisis was approaching, it passed the Economic Stimulus Act of 2008 and the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. During the pandemic, there were the Cares Act of 2020 and the American Rescue Plan of 2021.

Separate from this immediate relief, Congress also tries to address root causes. So, after the savings and loan crisis of the 1980s, there was the Financial Institutions Reform, Recovery and Enforcement Act of 1989, while the Troubled Asset Relief Program of 2008 was aimed at the causes of the Great Recession. The vaccine efforts for Operation Warp Speed were included in the Cares Act.

Believe it or not, Congress doesn’t always hit the mark. Economists have debated and will continue to debate whether any relief package is or was too small or too large, too little or too much, too soon or too late, too broad or too narrow. Politics always plays a role in their size and design.

And yet, all this legislation and all this debate is not possible without a shared premise: Congress sees the economy sliding and wants to do something about it.

Does that premise still hold? The evidence is overwhelming that today’s congressional Republicans serve a constituency of one: the president. They prefer to lie on his behalf, or at least not to counter his absurd claim that the jobs numbers were rigged, rather than to raise alarm about the economy’s slide. If the economy does enter a recession and Republicans refuse to acknowledge it, then it follows that they will also refuse to pass legislation to help Americans weather the downturn.

Antoni’s confirmation is interesting for one reason, and one reason only: It’s a test of whether Republicans can put the interests of the economy over those of the president. If the Senate confirms his nomination, it’s tantamount to their saying they’d rather see millions of Americans suffer than tell the president he’s wrong. If he isn’t confirmed, there’s still a chance that, when the economy does turn, Congress will intervene on Americans’ behalf.

Bloomberg

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