Bulwark Takes - Trump’s Disastrous BLS Pick is a Bad Sign for America’s Future

Episode Date: August 12, 2025

JVL and Jonathan Cohn are joined by economist Jason Furman to discuss Trump’s pick of E.J. Antoni to lead the Bureau of Labor Statistics, a choice that is highly partisan, unqualified, and threatens trust in economic data with potential long-term risks to policymaking and governance.

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Please play responsibly. If you have questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact Connix Ontario at 1866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. But MGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with Eye Gaming Ontario. Hello, everyone. I'm JVL here with my bulwark colleague, Jonathan Cohn, and a special guest, Jason Furman, former economist inside the Obama administration, teaches a legendary econ class right now at Harvard. And we're here to talk about a kind of insane Trump appointment to head the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Donald Trump has nominated E.J. Anthony. I just want to read from his bio at his current perch. at the Heritage Foundation. He is 37 years old, so it must be a real hot-shot economist.

I'm going to start from the top, so you can understand where he believes are his chief qualifications in his bio. E.J. Anthony, Ph.D., is the chief economist and Richard Aster fellow

in the Heritage Foundation's Grover M. Herman Center for the federal budget. His work has been featured with a variety of news outlets, including Fox News and Fox Business, Wall Street Journal, Allen Hall,

Bloomberg Daily Caller, National Review, CNBC, Washington Times, the Washington Examiner, Breitbart, the Federalist and others. So his

not a lot of peer-reviewed articles and scholarly journals, but he's made it into Breitbart and the Federalist with his work. Jason, I guess we'll start with you. On a skill of 1 to 10, how insane is this appointment?

It's probably a 9. and I'm trying to restrain myself. Otherwise, I'll start, like, foaming at the mouth and yelling. And I generally try to be a reasonable and balanced person, but that's all being tested in the current moment. So, I mean, tell me more. I mean, I, you know, I look at this in, you know, as a layperson who is interested in economics, I think, okay, well,

so the president fires the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics because he doesn't like the jobs report. And that has to shake confidence in government data. And so if we wanted to give the president the benefit of the doubt, he would say, okay, well, he's got to go and appoint somebody who's really beyond reproach, who everybody respects that will calm the markets and it will make people on the outside who are trying to understand what's actually happening under the hood of the economy, feel like they can accept the government's data going forward.

and instead he reaches to the bottom of the barrel for the dude who writes for the Federalist at Breitbart and the Daily Caller. That seems like it's an attempt to send a message by the president almost. Yeah, no, that's exactly right. And, you know, I don't think anyone thought the president was on the level when he said he wanted to get better quality data. There are a whole bunch of technical things that could improve the data. It would be wonderful to have a great person. We actually just had a great person there. She was fired.

There's other great people out there, but this is not a way to increase confidence in the data. This is someone who's extremely partisan, who does not understand the data that the organization produces, has not contributed anything to the understanding of statistics other than misleading mud throwing, is not in touch with the different stakeholders that really rely on this data in the business community. in financial markets at the Federal Reserve, has no experience managing anything. And, you know, as you said at the very beginning, just sends a really terrible signal about what the president wants to see from the statistical agency. But a terrible signal, but an intentional one, right?

I mean, here's what Trump said on truth social late on Monday. Our economy is booming and E.J. will ensure that the numbers released are honest and accurate, which seems to begin with the conclusion and then work backwards to the right I mean he has determined that the economy is booming so all numbers must show that the economy is booming I don't know it just feels like

authoritarianish sort of stuff like you know the the strong man says what is what is the reality and then deputizes people to go and build up a scaffolding to support that reality. Jonathan Cohn

am I am I crazy? I feel like I've come back from vacation and all I see is fascism everywhere. Yeah. I don't think you're crazy. And let me just say something for our viewers and listeners here just to put Jason's comments in perspective. Because I've known Jason for a long time. And I think other reporters who cover policy would back up what I'm about to say, which is that Jason is notoriously mild-mannered and careful someone who, you know, he worked for a Democratic administration, but we'll praise Republicans. So if Jason is saying this is a nine, it's probably really a 15, like that's how bad this is. And it's not crazy. And I mean, it's right out,

I mean, there's like no subtlety to this. You know, I remember there have been episodes in the past where like, you know, there was a CBO, how does it so unappointed or run the congressional budget office, which is another agency we depend on for impartial analysis. And there was a lot of concern that, you know, maybe they were, you know, there was, they were getting rid of a Democratic appointee and bringing in a Republican appointee who had very clear ideological priors was really trying to push a point of view. And the fear was they were sort of subtle. And it was going to be subtle. And first of all, actually turned out not to be the case. Most of these CBO heads, even the ones who were thought to be very ideological, turned out

to be, you know, quite, you know, good CBO directors. But, I mean, this is like not subtle at all. I mean, this is a guy who is clearly a, just partisan. I don't want to be like a snob or anything about this. And I'm the last person in the world to play the intellectual, you know, the sort of academic credential game. But, I mean, this is not a pure to be someone who's published extensively in academic literature. There's just, you know, all his publications are in these highly partisan outlets. And so, I mean, I just, you know, there's like no mystery here. It's not no dog whistling, no hidden agenda. Trump is basically coming right out and telling us, like, I want these results. I'm putting a guy in there who's going to give him to me.

Yeah. I mean, I have so many questions. I guess one of them, Jason, for you is what are the downstream consequences of this? Like in the real world, people have to make decisions about policy. They have to make decisions about investment. And, you know, if you run a business, you have to make decisions about what you think the environment is like and whether you're going to do, you know, capital expenditures or not or hiring or build a factory. Once you stop being able to trust the numbers coming out of the government. Like, what happens? Like, is everything fine? Does it turn out that we don't really need the numbers? And, like, it's, like, whatever, like, because the markets don't seem, overnight, the markets don't seem to have reacted to this, which is kind of surprising. Right. So, so first of, let me say two things. One is the numbers that BLS produces are probably the single most important. They're the first read of inflation that we get every month, the first read of jobs we get every month. If you look at the mandate of the Federal Reserve, it is literally

jobs and inflation. So this is basically the way, you know, if you're thinking of like the Fed is driving a car and they're looking out the window, they're looking at the window at those BLS statistics. That's how they're trying to navigate what right now, by the way, is a difficult road. The good news here, though, is I have no doubt what Trump is trying to do. I have no doubt that what Antony would like to do, I am not at all sure that they're going to be able to pull it off. Tell me more. There are 2,000 career people at the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The final numbers for both jobs and inflation do not go to the BLS Commissioner until their

absolutely final PDF cannot change. They don't get to sit in the room and kick the tires and say, are you sure about this? Should this be a little bit higher? You know, I'd like it to be that. So to keep just any impression at all of interference, they are kept very far away from it. Now, is that going to continue happening? Are there other ways you could influence the numbers? Could you announce a change in methodology that's skewed in a certain way?

There's all sorts of things that we'll be looking out for. But the one thing is, good news is I think it will be very, very hard to fake the data without people knowing. There will be whistleblowers in the BLS. You will read about it in the New York Times. You will hear about it here on the bulwark. And that is if it happens. So there's a lot of protections there. So we're going to see this will be a fight between 2,000 dedicated career people

and a president and a leader who does not have the back of those career people. To me, this is a lot of it is of a piece with his campaign against Jerome Powell. And he's really trying to politicize the underpinnings of like, economic policy, which traditionally just lie outside of that stuff, right? And he's trying to personalize it and bring those things under his direct control. I guess the question is, are there real world downsides? For you and John, right? I mean, does it ultimately matter?

I mean, I sit and I think, well, sure it matters, because if you are a large corporation who's got to make decisions about what you're going to do and you realize you can't trust the data coming out of the government, which means you can't understand what the reality the environment is, then you're going to stand pat, right? Or you're going to hedge. You're going to be really reluctant to try to expand or to do anything new and innovative that carries risk. Everybody's going to become much more risk-averse.

But maybe that's not true. I know. Like, what happens if people can't trust data coming out or think that, like, for instance, you know, Jerome Powell, I assume is going to be replaced at some point. You know, he's replaced with Maria Barteroma, right? Like, what happens? Yeah. So, I mean, countries that have fired their statisticians have generally seen their currencies depreciate. Sometimes it's taken years. Argentina started faking the inflation data, but it took

a couple years before it really caught up with them in a big way. And it culminated in a huge default and I believe the largest IMF program in its history. Greece was cooking the books. Again, And it took a while to catch up. They are a massive, massive default and another massive IMF program. So I'm not saying that we're getting the same things at the same scale here, but you couldn't necessarily judge this by the next day either. So you do this and you do five other things, including, you know, a hostile takeover of the Federal Reserve and end of its independence.

And you end up in a world where, in the best case, you have sort of higher interest. interest rates and higher mortgage rates because of the extra risk we have in our economy. And in the worst case, you really do have, you know, a potentially very bad outcome. I think, again, this takes time, though. This is not, none of this is an overnight thing. Even firing Jay Powell tomorrow would be a terrible thing to do. I think there would be a big market reaction, but he's one of 12 people on the committee. It's going to take a little bit more patience and diligence to take away the end

dependents of the Fed than even firing, you know, one very, very important person there. So, you know, I was thinking when this happened, I kind of flashed back to 2020. Do you guys remember in COVID early? This was like June or July. And Trump made this statement where he basically said, you know, if we just stopped testing people, we wouldn't have so many cases. If you don't test, you don't have any cases. If we stop testing right now, would have very few cases, if any. I thought about that when what this is going on. And of course, that wouldn't have worked. And it would not have taken, as opposed to the economic statistics, it would have been apparent pretty quickly. Just, I mean, you would see it in your local hospitals. People were

dying. And so, you know, part of me thinks that absolutely this matters and absolutely you can't get away for it for too long. But I also, you know, what I worry, what kind of worries me more in some ways. It doesn't worry me more, but I think it's probably a more realistic scenario. You know, as Jason was saying, it is hard to move BLS. It's hard to, you know, if you think more broadly, this is part of like attack on census figures and statistics out of the Department of Health and Human Services and EPA and every federal agency. Some of this stuff is hard to move because it's got these underpinnings and a large career workforce, all these processes that have been put in place over decades. And just blowing them up is tough and there would be a reaction. I were

about the sort of more subtle, gradual degradation of the quality of these that just sort of filters into our policymaking and makes it more difficult. You know, if we don't know what the poverty level is, we don't know what's going on with global warming. You just sort of go down the list. We don't know what's working in education and isn't working in education. And this isn't the kind of thing that's going to like just show up as, you know, people dying in the hospital or the currency collapsing. But it's going to mean in 10 or 20 years, just the quality of our governance is much worse because we need that information and we are losing our ability to generate it and to trust it. Yeah. I mean, if we jump up to 30,000 feet here, I mean, I would say this is of a piece exactly with the idea of like, you know, well, if you don't test there are no cases. But that is, itself is a larger view of politics, right?

you know, we have been operating for many generations at this point in a world where the idea is that you win at politics by delivering things in the real world and that that's what people react to, right? They see that like, oh, I have a job. My job is good. They see that my quality of life is going up. I'm getting more health care or et cetera, et cetera. The Trump The Trump gamble here seems to be, no, we don't need to worry about that stuff. We can, politics now functions at the level of perception, kind of aside for objective reality. And so while the Democrats want to like have their fights over, I just thought about like Mum Donnie and the Democratic angst because he wants to open five municipal run grocery stores and expand rent control. And Democrats are like, nah, right?

And meanwhile, the Republicans are like, yeah, we're just going to blow up labor force participation data. And the whole party's like, cool, cool, let's do it. And that's because the two parties really have different views of how to be successful in this environment with, you know, the voters we have today. And that worries me. Like that, I mean, that's the sort of thing where I just think to myself, well, voters don't react to this and don't say, no, no, we don't like that. Go back to delivering real-world outcomes for us. Like, I don't know where this all lead. I guess, Jason, before we go, is there any way to stop this train?

I mean, this is a Senate-confirmed position. Is it foolish to think that senators might say, oh, come on? I don't know. I had, you know, certainly the wonk community is united on this one, whether it's Republican wanks or Democratic wanks, every single one of them, has been scathing about this. In a way, there's a little bit of comfort to me. There is a community out there with a very diverse set of views

on basic principles, on what justice is, even on how the economy operates, who do have a shared understanding of what's reality and what's not reality. So there is a community out there in the Wonk world. Does that community translate and influence the Senate As of now, I have no idea whatsoever, but ultimately I do think the most concerning thing here is not the economic crisis or something like that, but just this is one of many, many things

that are deliberately destroying trust. If people want to argue about whether 70,000 jobs in a month is fantastic or terrible and spin it one way or the other, that's totally fine with me. If they all want to say, you know, we don't even believe the 70,000 and think it was made up and partisan, that's just another level at which it becomes very, very hard to have a conversation or debate about anything. All right. I'm going to ask you one more question because I have you here, and I'm such a huge fan of

years anyway. Just a macroeconomic question. In an advanced economy like the United States has, can you just give me like the Econ 101 explanation of how important trust is to the system? Yeah, trust is actually very important. important. Economists have studied this. And the basic issue is if you could write a contract that covered every single contingency and possibility, then maybe you wouldn't need trust. But writing those contracts is themselves costly, is themselves inevitably going to still

have some loopholes. And if everyone's always trying to drive a loophole through it, take advantage of someone else, deliver a product a day late, pay a day late, etc., everything on unravels. And so trust really is an important contributor to economic growth and one that rich countries tend to do better on than poor countries, but I'm worried about the direction it's going right now. All right. Jason Furman, thank you for being with us. Jonathan Cohn, thank you for sitting in on this with me, buddy. We will see you guys again soon with, you know, I'm sure there'll be good news at some point. One of these days, we're going to sit down to do a video. We're going to be like, Hey, guys, great news.

We got something awesome to share with you. A million jobs in a month. Who couldn't be happy? Boy, I'm looking forward to the September numbers, Jason.