Last falll, the Trump White House pulled E.J. Antoni’s nomination to lead the Bureau of Labor Statistics, presumably because he was caught running a now-deleted Twitter account that lobbed sexually denigrating attacks on Vice President Kamala Harris, spread conspiracy theories and threatened Trump critics. Yet the Media Research Center continued to treat Antoni as a credible economist. Joseph Vazquez uncritically quoted Antoni in a Nov. 20 post gushing over job numbers:
But as Heritage Foundation economist EJ Antoni contextualized in a November 20 X post, “Labor force participation improved for 2nd month in a row in Sep as 470k more people piled into the labor market M/M, w/ 251k getting jobs and 219k still looking for work; this is why the unemployment rate rose even as more people got jobs and the employment level increased.”
Vazquez quoted Antoni again in a Nov. 28 post:
But now, as EJ Antoni pointed out based on the recent September jobs numbers, “Net job growth in Sep was from full-time hiring and replacing part-time work w/ those full-time jobs; this is a welcomed improvement after the weakness earlier in the year.”
Vazquez used Antoni to rebut Paul Krugman in a Dec. 18 post:
Heritage Foundation economist EJ Antoni also repudiated the Krugman-esque line of reasoning, arguing in a December 16 column that “alleged weakness [in the job market] is almost entirely confined to government bureaucrats and foreign workers, while private industry is employing more Americans.” This, argued Antoni, is part of Trump’s gambit to reprivatize the economy away from the public sector. In fact, wrote Antoni, this was “the best November ever for employment among native-born Americans, up more than 2.6 million over the last 12 months and setting a record, albeit on a non-seasonally adjusted basis. Conversely, the number of foreign-born workers with jobs declined over this period by 21,000.”
Antoni got the call from Vazquez again in a Jan. 23 post:
Heritage Foundation Chief Economist EJ Antoni noted in May 2025 that “Month after month, the government bean-counters under former-president Biden published overly optimistic estimates for everything from job growth to the size of the economy, only to have those numbers routinely—and quietly—revised down later.”
Vazquez served up yet more Trump sycophancy from Antoni in a Feb. 12 post:
But as Heritage Foundation economist EJ Antoni pointed out, this misses the point: “Trump was handed an economy that was losing private sector jobs and adding gov’t payrolls, but he successfully flipped the script, and one year later it’s all private sector growth while cutting gov’t jobs.”
Vazquez made sure not to mention Antoni’s failed BLS nomination.
Further discrediting Antoni is the fact that he works for Heritage, which was recently caught failing to sufficiently denounce the anti-Semitism of Tucker Carlson, who had interviewed prolific far-right hater Nick Fuentes. The MRC censored all mention of this scandal.