Our reporting shows: The Project 2025 architect with the Nazi art is set to control America’s numbers

At first glance, the news seems technocratic: The president wants to make a Heritage Foundation economist, E. J. Antoni, the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics - the apparatus that measures the temperature of the American labor market month after month. But hardly has the personnel decision been announced when images appear showing Antoni in the crowd at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. The White House rushes to frame it and declares him a mere observer who had “just wandered over.” This is where the real story begins: not with legal boundary lines, but with the question of how much trust a democracy can place in a man who appears in the wrong picture on the day of an attack on its institutions - and who is to be responsible for the official numbers of this republic from now on. The Bureau of Labor Statistics is not a backdrop. It is a machine whose products - employment figures, wages, hours, industry impulses - are translated into budgets, interest rates, collective bargaining agreements, investment decisions. Its authority rests on two simple pillars: methodological rigor and political abstinence. Whoever rises to the top of this machine must be more than competent; he must act credibly nonpolitical, especially when politics rages around him. If the same candidate appears in images from January 6 and the executive is busily trying to portray him as an uninvolved bystander, that is not a detail. It is a blemish on the varnish of independence.

Astonishingly little personal information is known about E. J. Antoni himself - a gap that stands out in such a significant nomination. Born on October 21, 1987, in Illinois, he is 37 years old today. His early years remain in the dark: no public information about parents, siblings, or childhood. What is known points to an unusual path. Antoni attended a Catholic seminary, where he was known as Erwin Antoni - a detail that suggests he originally wanted to become a priest. But he was never ordained. Instead, he turned to economics and earned his master’s and PhD in economics at Northern Illinois University between 2016 and 2020, while simultaneously teaching courses in labor economics as well as money and banking as a graduate instructor.

His professional career began in 2020 at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a conservative think tank, where he focused on fiscal and monetary policy. In 2022, he moved to the Heritage Foundation, initially as a research fellow at the Grover M. Hermann Center for the Federal Budget. His rise was rapid: Today he is the organization’s chief economist and Richard Aster Fellow. In parallel, he is a senior fellow at the Committee to Unleash Prosperity, an organization co-founded by Stephen Moore that propagates supply-side economics. Antoni is a regular guest in conservative media - from Fox News to Breitbart to The Wall Street Journal. His connection to Steve Bannon’s “War Room” podcast is particularly close, where he called the previous BLS chief Erika McEntarfer “incompetent” and urged Trump to fire her.

The Heritage Foundation is no ordinary think tank. Since its founding in 1973, it has become the most influential conservative institution in Washington, systematically working to reshape American politics. Antoni is not just any economist there - he is a key figure in the organization. His appointment as BLS chief is part of a larger pattern: Heritage staff fill strategic positions in government to implement conservative policy. The foundation has for decades pursued what it calls “Mandate for Leadership” - detailed blueprints for conservative presidencies. Under Reagan, 60 percent of its recommendations were implemented within a year. Under Trump, it was 64 percent in the first term. Now, in the second Trump administration, Heritage is going one step further.

Antoni is not only a Heritage economist - he is an active co-architect of Project 2025, that 900-page manifesto that envisions nothing less than a fundamental reordering of the American federal government. The project, initiated by Heritage President Kevin Roberts, pursues four pillars: a comprehensive policy agenda, a personnel database for conservative cadres (“Conservative LinkedIn”), a Presidential Administration Academy to train political appointees, and a detailed playbook for the first 180 days of a new administration. The plan calls for massively consolidating executive power - based on the unitary executive theory, which grants the president almost unlimited control over federal agencies. More than 80 conservative organizations are involved, including Turning Point USA under Charlie Kirk, the Conservative Partnership Institute with former Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows, the Center for Renewing America under Russell Vought, and America First Legal under Stephen Miller. Of the 34 lead authors of the project, 31 were already nominated or appointed to positions during Trump’s first term.

Roberts himself has stated the goal clearly: it is about “institutionalizing Trumpism.” In an interview with journalist Lulu Garcia-Navarro, he said that Heritage is working to “consolidate the executive, dismantle federal agencies, and recruit and vet government employees to free the next Republican president from a system stacked against conservative power.” In July 2024, Roberts spoke of a “second American revolution” that “will remain bloodless if the left allows it.” This rhetoric is no accident - it reflects the radicalization of a movement that sees democratic norms as obstacles.

The images from January 6, 2021, are clear: E. J. Antoni was there. Videos from the social media platform Parler, archived by ProPublica, show him on the Capitol grounds - about an hour after the mob broke through the police barricades. Surveillance footage from the Capitol Police documents his presence on both the west and east sides of the building. At that time, the police were desperately fighting to prevent the mob from taking over the inauguration platform. The crowd had already surrounded the building but had not yet entered. Alex Jones’s voice boomed through megaphones, tear gas hung in the air. The footage shows Antoni moving away from the building - apparently he left the grounds as others began to enter the Capitol.

The White House claims Antoni was in the city for “meetings” - according to his LinkedIn profile, he was working at the time for the Committee to Unleash Prosperity, whose offices were a few blocks away. After learning about the events on the news, he said he stopped by out of curiosity. White House spokesperson Taylor Rogers emphasizes that Antoni was merely a “bystander” who “observed and then left the Capitol area.” The explanation raises more questions than it answers: Who sees reports of a violent mob and decides to stop by in person? Who happened to have “meetings” in Washington on that historic day when Congress was to certify Joe Biden’s election?

Legally, Antoni may be unburdened - he did not enter the Capitol, was never indicted. The Justice Department focused its investigations on those who entered the building or behaved aggressively. But the symbolic dimension weighs more heavily: Here was someone who was part of a crowd that tried to prevent the certification of a democratic election. More than 1,500 people were indicted over the events, seven deaths are linked to the attack. The fact that Trump pardoned all January 6 defendants on the first day of his second term does not make matters better - it normalizes the attack on democracy.

Another disturbing detail has been brought to light by reporting: In Antoni’s office hangs a huge painting of the Bismarck - Adolf Hitler’s favorite battleship. The picture, divided across five canvases, can be seen in the background of numerous media appearances. In a Bitcoin podcast from October 2023, Antoni was asked about it directly. “The Bismarck, yes, in all its glory,” he replied, adding: “It now lies on the ocean floor, along with the Hood, which it sank only days earlier.” The Bismarck was launched in 1939, Hitler gave a speech at the ceremony and made it the pride of his navy. It was considered the most powerful, largest, and fastest ship of its time. In May 1941, it was sunk by the British, even before the US entered the war. Over 2,000 people died.

The White House defended Antoni as a “history enthusiast” whose office was full of “artifacts,” including depictions of American warships. But the specific choice of the Bismarck - and Antoni’s apparent pride in it - raises questions. In July 2024, as we were able to uncover through our reporting, Antoni recommended to the far-right commentator Candace Owens the book “Churchill, Hitler, and ‘The Unnecessary War’” by Patrick J. Buchanan, which sharply criticizes Britain’s involvement in both world wars. “Among other valuable historical information, it describes in detail how British statesmen bragged about starving German civilians to death,” Antoni wrote on X. Antoni’s economic policy positions are no less controversial. In a December interview with a Houston radio station, he called Social Security a “Ponzi scheme” and urged that the program be phased out - despite Trump’s promise to protect Social Security. He has repeatedly referred to the BLS’s monthly jobs reports as “phony baloney” and once joked that the “L” in BLS is silent. His solution: suspend the monthly reports altogether and publish only quarterly until data collection is “improved.”

This position reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of the role of the BLS. The monthly labor market data are not an academic exercise - they are the basis for the Federal Reserve’s interest rate decisions, for collective bargaining, for businesses’ investment decisions, for the calculation of social benefits. A delay or manipulation of these data would have catastrophic consequences for the economy. Markets rely on BLS data, international organizations use them as a reference, trading partners make decisions based on them.

Economists’ reactions to Antoni’s nomination are devastating. Justin Wolfers of the University of Michigan calls him “catastrophically terrible” and a “1200%, 1300%, maybe 1400% pro-Trump partisan” with no relevant expertise in data collection. “He has demonstrated no commitment to the truth,” says Wolfers. Jason Furman, former Obama adviser and Harvard economist, calls him an “extreme partisan” without relevant qualifications - a break with decades of bipartisan technocrats at the helm of the BLS. Jessica Riedl of the conservative Manhattan Institute notes that she has never encountered Antoni in Washington policy circles, but “the articles and tweets I’ve seen from him are probably the most flawed of any think-tank economist right now.” Even conservative economists distance themselves. Dave Hebert of the American Institute for Economic Research writes: “I have been in several programs with him and was impressed by two things: his inability to understand basic economics and the speed with which he became MAGA.” William Beach, himself a Heritage economist and Trump’s first BLS chief, publicly criticized the firing of McEntarfer.

Trump had fired McEntarfer in early August after the July jobs numbers came in weaker than expected - only 73,000 new jobs instead of the projected 109,000, with massive downward revisions for May and June. The president claimed without evidence that the numbers had been “manipulated” to boost Kamala Harris’s election chances. The reality is more prosaic: declining response rates to surveys since the pandemic have made data collection more difficult, revisions are normal and methodologically grounded. There is no evidence of political manipulation. The defense line is predictable: no barricade crossed, no act of violence committed, no threshold of criminal liability breached. But independence is not measured by indictments. It is measured by distance - internal as well as external. A future guardian of official statistics must radiate the privilege of neutrality so that his decisions are not read as political impositions. Whoever stood in the stream of supporters on January 6 will carry this burden from now on. Not because he is guilty, but because symbols stick.

Antoni’s nomination must be confirmed by the Senate. Republicans have a 53-47 majority, but it takes only four defectors to sink the nomination. Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina, who will retire next year, has already indicated that January 6 could be a “deal-breaker” for him. Senators such as Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, who have opposed extreme nominations in the past, could also hesitate. Democrats are already calling for hearings before the HELP Committee when Congress returns to Washington in September.

The explosiveness of the personnel decision lies therefore less in Antoni’s vita than in the interface to which he is to be appointed. The office demands ignoring the temptations of power: no shifting of release dates, no trimming of series, no evasions on revisions. It demands a self-conception that protects numbers before goals. Any uncertainty about whether this self-conception holds eats away at trust - and trust is the only currency in which statistics are paid. The hectic framing from the White House shows that the political explosive force has been recognized. But reassurances are not enough. Whoever wants to secure the integrity of an institution must state the expectation clearly: total methodological transparency, strict shielding against political interference, publicly comprehensible justifications for every relevant decision. And he must accept that the images of January 6 set a trial that can only be passed with overemphatic sobriety.

Antoni’s nomination is more than a personnel decision - it is a test for American democracy. Can an institution that is based on trust and impartiality be led by someone who stood on the wrong side of history on the darkest day of recent American history? Can the Bureau of Labor Statistics preserve its credibility if its chief comes from the ranks of those who want to reshape the system “from the inside,” as Project 2025 envisions? The international community is watching this development with concern. If the United States - long a guarantor of reliable economic data - begins to politicize its statistical agencies, this will have global consequences. That is what it is ultimately about: the question of whether this personnel decision is a commitment to independence or a gesture of loyalty disguised as statistics. A country that takes stock of its situation in numbers cannot afford to perceive the architect of those numbers as a political actor. The markets will feel it, businesses, wage bargainers, citizens. And they will not forgive politics if, in the end, the impression remains that reality is negotiable.

E. J. Antoni can only pay down this burden himself: through consistent distance, through a language of method rather than camps, through decisions that extinguish any doubt. If that does not succeed, one sentence will remain above all from this nomination: The statistics became political. There are hardly any more dangerous words.

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