Last week, President Trump fired the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics. His new nominee to replace them is a Northern Illinois University grad.
E.J. Antoni received both a Master’s and Ph.D. in economics from NIU. Antoni was a graduate assistant at the university for almost four years, up until his graduation in 2020.
His dissertation was called "Fiscal Triumvirate: Analyses of Crowding Out from Deficit Spending, of Domestic Migration from State Taxes, and of the Irrelevance of Credit Ratings on Municipal Debt Yields."
"E.J. did very good empirical work on issues such as the effect of taxes on migration," said NIU economics professor Carl Campbell in a statement to WNIJ. Campbell was Antoni's dissertation advisor. "On a personal level, E.J. was a kind and respectful student."
Antoni also briefly served as an adjunct professor at Sauk Valley Community College in Dixon.
The economist has worked at the Heritage Foundation since 2022, where he contributed to the policy initiative Project 2025.
Antoni has two reviews on the crowd-sourced teacher rating site "Rate My Professors" from his time at Sauk Valley and NIU.
Both apparent students claim that he was well-versed in economics, but unnecessarily injected conservative politics into class and used material from right-wing networks like PragerU.
After Trump called previous bureau data “rigged,” some economists worry the move will undercut trust in the agency’s future numbers.
