Consider This from NPR - What we know about President Trump's nominee to lead the Bureau of Labor Statistics

Episode Date: August 17, 2025

President Trump turned to the Heritage Foundation help pick his appointee to lead a traditionally non-partisan agency. NPR’s Scott Detrow speaks with political science professor E.J. Fagan, author of “The Thinkers: The Rise of Partisan Think Tanks and the Polarization of American Politics” to understand why Trump’s close relationship with the conservative think tank matters.For sponsor-free episodes of Consider This, sign up for Consider This+ via Apple Podcasts or atplus.npr.org. Email us at [e-mail] episode was produced by Jordan-Marie Smith. It was edited by Tinbete Ermyas. Our executive producer is Sami Yenigun.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

It's been a pretty good year for the Heritage Foundation. Everybody knows, Steve Moore, with the Heritage Foundation, highly respected, one of the most highly respected economists. Often work in so-called think tanks in Washington, D.C. can be pretty theoretical. People work on policy ideas that may or may not ever make their way into actual real-life policy in Congress or the White House. That's not the case for the Heritage Foundation, a conservative group that has been a driving force in the Trump administration's agenda. ahead of last year's election, the group published a plan for President Trump's second term in office, called Project 2025. It has come to define most of his major accomplishments, like cracking down on illegal immigration, gutting the federal workforce, and even ending funding for public media. During the campaign, Democrats used the plan as an attack line.

It's called Project 2025, a 922-page blueprint to make Donald Trump the most powerful president. Those attacks were so effective that Trump distanced himself at the time from the group. That's out there. I haven't read it. I don't want to read it purposely. I'm not going to read it. This was a group of people that got together. They came up with some ideas. I guess some good, some bad. Now the federal government is running off many of those ideas. And last week, Trump intertwined his administration and the Heritage Foundation even more. His new nominee for Commissioner of Labor Statistics is E.J. Antony, the think tank's chief economist. Trump nominated a new person to head the Bureau of Labor Statistics, E.J. Antony, who's an economist from the

Conservative Heritage Foundation, that choice got immediate blowback from economists on both the left and the right. The appointment surprised so many people because the BLS is traditionally nonpartisan, a data-driven agency. Consider this. The Heritage Foundation has the ear of President Trump and some of its staff are taking on positions within his administration. After the break, a scholar who has studied the group talks about its origins and how Heritage has worked to a line itself with the Trump administration in recent years. From NPR, I'm Scott Detrow. It's considered this from NPR.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics has long been an organization defined by its objectivity and separation from party politics. That is, until President Trump fired its head after BLS released an economic report he didn't like. Now Trump wants the Heritage Foundation's top accomplice. to run the Bureau. We wanted to learn more about the think tank in this moment and why it's playing such a key role in a changing Washington, D.C. That's why we've brought in E.J. Fagan, a political science professor at the University of Illinois in Chicago. He's also the author

of the book The Thinkers, The Rise of Partisan Think tanks and the polarization of American politics. He's looked specifically at the changes at the Heritage Foundation in recent years. The Heritage Foundation is a think tank. It is the leading conservative think tank. It's one of the largest think tanks in Washington, D.C. has been around for about 50 years. And through most of that time has been one of the most important organizations backing the conservative side of the Republican Party. Before we get to everything that's happening right now, is there one specific moment you could point to where the Heritage Foundation starts to make the shift from a Mitt Romney George W. Bush-style conservative organization to fully embracing the current MAGA Republican

Trump-era party? I can. Although I'd say, you know, I don't think they ever were truly on the George W. Bush Mitt Romney side. I think it was the New Gingrich, Ronald Reagan side, is what you'd point to. And they very often were on the outs with certain types of Republicans. Republican parties are a coalition. And they were a piece of that coalition. But I think the moment that you see this real shift, there's a leadership transition in 2013 when kind of the old guard of the Heritage Foundation that had founded it, their president, Ed Fullner, who recently died, leaves, retires. And, And Jim DeMitt, Republican Senator, actually retires from the Senate in order to take a very large salary to be the new president of the Heritage Foundation. And you see this rapid shift from that organization kind of beginning at that point. Yeah. So what's the best way to think about the relationship right now between Heritage and the Trump administration? So much focus was made a project 2025. But what's the way to think about how they're interacting with each other?

Who's taking cues from who? Sure. I think that the Heritage Foundation is playing a role for Donald Trump in that his first administration, was staffed by kind of the coalition of the Republican Party. A lot of people who had worked in previous Republican administrations, who were pretty well qualified for their jobs, and some people from Heritage's side of the Republican Party. And that was very normal for a Republican Party administration. And what Heritage did with Project 2025 is they organized a Trump administration that could just elbow out pretty much the entire other side of the party, the Mitt Romney side of the

party, the George W. Bush side of the party. Like, what's the chicken and egg way to think about this? Was this heritage seeing what Trump's inner orbit wanted to do and putting policy scaffolding around it? Or was it suggesting, like, if you get back in office, start here. Here's some ideas. I think there's less policy scaffolding than Heritage would want you to believe right now. The bargain that that Heritage has been making really since about 2022 or so is that they're willing to be the lowest common denominator, right? They're willing to be the organization that enables a more authoritarian Republican Party. What's one or two specific examples you would point to? Sure. I mean, if you read Project

2025, I mean, it's arguing for the complete abolishing of, you know, whole cabinet departments. It's arguing for it's employing people who were at January 6th. It is just, as somebody who's read a lot of Heritage Foundation reports over the decades, I mean, it really becomes much more of an advocacy group, right? You start, you start seeing much more op-eds about radical change. For example, in 2017, 2018, they're not publishing things that are pro-tariff. E.J. Antony, who is the BLS commissioner nominee from the Heritage Foundation, he's publishing what are essentially blog posts praising Donald Trump, calling him a genius for tariffs, right? That's a real shift, and it's a shift away from what we traditionally think of a Ronald Reagan conservatism at Heritage. Yeah. Let's talk about him for a moment. We noted

this in the intro, you just noted now. He has now been tapped to take over the Bureau of Labor Statistics. There is an opening because President Trump fired the head of BLS because he did not like the monthly economic data that was published by BLS, which raised a lot of alarms because this is supposed to be nonpartisan data that we can all trust. And Trump is signaling he doesn't want it to be that. How are you thinking about this nomination given the context of how it happened. And Tony is incredibly unqualified for that job. I mean, I think it's a sign of the decline of heritage that they couldn't find somebody better. BLS is a real job, right? The BLS commissioner is responsible for gathering data. I mean, this is not a traditional, highly political position for a

reason. I think that I think he's going to be a disaster over there. It's already an understaffed department, a department that got hit very hard in the first part of 2025. And, you know, I, I, I'm just very skeptical that they're going to continue putting out the current population survey, which is one of the most important data sets in not just the study of American economics, but of the actual practice of American economics. I think you've touched on this here and there, but what do you think the role of a think tank is in a world where the people in charge don't have much respect for expertise?

I think it depends on the think tank, right? So the premise of the Heritage Foundation was always that the experts are wrong and then we're going to give you the other answer. The idea being that, you know, the Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford and Republicans in Congress in the 1970s, they're talking to the same people Democrats are talking to. They're coming up with very similar ideas. And so, you know, they go out and they betray conservatives. And so we're going to provide you experts, people who can give you a conservative answer to a question,

not the answer that those experts who we think are liberal are going to give you. The dangerous thing is that they're still an influential organization. and so they've replaced the real policy walks with enablers. And I think that's really, if I were, if I were, you know, someone who's concerned about the conservative policy world, I'd be very concerned about that. I think that it's actually, in some ways, they're both their strongest and their weakest right now. E.J. Fagan is a political science professor and author of the book The Thinkers, the Rise of Partisan Think tanks and the polarization of American politics.

reached out to the White House for comment on Fagan's criticisms of E.J. Antony, Trump's pick for BLS Commissioner, a spokesperson sent a response which reads, in part, quote, Antony's education and vast experience as an economist has prepared him to produce accurate public data. In addition to being the chief economist at the Heritage Foundation, he has frequently testified before Congress on economic issues. Its research has been featured by many think tanks and advocacy groups. This episode was produced by Jordan Marie Smith and Henry Larson. It was edited by Tinby Ermius. Our executive producer is Sammy Yannigan. It's Consider This from NPR. I'm Scott Detra.

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