Are There No Prisons? Are There No Workhouses?

Donald Trump’s latest appointment tells you almost everything you need to know about his second-term project: the capture of facts themselves. This week, he named E.J. Antoni, chief economist at the ultraconservative Heritage Foundation, to run the Bureau of Labor Statistics — the agency responsible for measuring the nation’s employment and inflation.

Antoni isn’t just a numbers man. He’s an ideologue. For years, his work at Heritage has been dedicated to reframing the story of the American economy so that every downturn can be blamed on regulation, every wage gain tied to tax cuts for the wealthy, and every hardship dismissed as an individual failure.

The BLS is supposed to be a neutral scoreboard — a place where the raw data is gathered and reported without political varnish. Under Antoni, that firewall is gone. The agency will be inside the same political operation that’s pushing Project 2025, Heritage’s blueprint for dismantling federal protections, privatizing public services, and remaking the country along hard-right ideological lines.

This is not a personnel change. It’s a deliberate act of information control. Employment figures and inflation reports are more than economic markers — they’re the public’s barometer of trust. Skew the data, and you distort the national conversation. You make it harder for journalists, lawmakers, and the public to hold power to account.

The Dickens line — “Are there no prisons? Are there no workhouses?” — wasn’t meant as policy advice. But in the America Antoni and Trump are shaping, it reads more like a mission statement. When the official record begins telling you the country is doing just fine — even as your rent doubles and your paycheck doesn’t stretch past Thursday — you’ll know the real work has been done. Not on the economy. On the truth.