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Stan Veuger, a senior economist with the conservative American Enterprise Institute, said it’s clear Antoni’s job would be to flatter the president. Cooking the books at BLS would be a tricky task, however, considering how many people are involved in collecting and collating the data.

“It’s difficult for him to go in there and just put out different numbers that are fake,” Veuger told HuffPost. “But I guess if you don’t put out any numbers, you won’t infuriate Trump.”

Veuger is one of many right-leaning policy experts who criticized Antoni’s nomination even before hearing of his proposal to shut down the jobs numbers. The critics have pointed to overt partisanship and hack analyses, such as an October 2024 paper that dubiously claimed the U.S. had been in a recession for two years, according to an apparent misinterpretation of data.