What we know about President Trump's nominee to lead the Bureau of Labor Statistics
Consider This from NPR
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🗓️ 17 August 2025
⏱️ 12 minutes
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Summary
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.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | It's been a pretty good year for the Heritage Foundation. |
| 0:03.6 | Everybody knows, Steve Moore, with the Heritage Foundation, highly respected, one of the most highly respected economists. |
| 0:11.3 | Often work in so-called think tanks in Washington, D.C. can be pretty theoretical. |
| 0:15.9 | People work on policy ideas that may or may not ever make their way into actual real-life policy in Congress |
| 0:22.2 | or the White House. That's not the case for the Heritage Foundation, a conservative group that |
| 0:26.8 | has been a driving force in the Trump administration's agenda. ahead of last year's election, |
| 0:31.8 | the group published a plan for President Trump's second term in office called Project 2025. |
| 0:37.4 | It has come to define most of his major accomplishments, like cracking down on illegal |
| 0:42.6 | immigration, gutting the federal workforce, and even ending funding for public media. |
| 0:48.0 | During the campaign, Democrats used the plan as an attack line. |
| 0:51.7 | It's called Project 2025, a 922-page blueprint to make Donald Trump the most powerful president ever. |
| 1:01.0 | Those attacks were so effective that Trump distanced himself at the time from the group. |
| 1:06.1 | That's out there. I haven't read it. I don't want to read it purposely. I'm not going to read it. |
| 1:11.6 | This was a group of people that got together. They came up with some ideas. I guess some good, some bad. Now, |
| 1:15.7 | the federal government is running off many of those ideas. And last week, Trump intertwined his |
| 1:20.0 | administration and the Heritage Foundation even more. His new nominee for Commissioner of Labor |
| 1:25.3 | Statistics is E.J. Antony, the think tank's chief economist. |
| 1:29.3 | Trump nominated a new person to head the Bureau of Labor Statistics, E.J. Anthony, who's an economist from the Conservative Heritage Foundation, |
| 1:36.3 | that choice got immediate blowback from economists on both the left and the right. |
| 1:41.3 | The appointment surprised so many people because the BLS is traditionally nonpartisan, |
| 1:45.8 | a data-driven agency. |
| 1:47.5 | Consider this. |
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