Washington, DC – Senators Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) and Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) issued a statement today calling into question the qualifications of Dr. William Beach, Vice President for Policy Research at the Koch brothers-funded Mercatus Center and formerly of the Heritage Foundation, to lead the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Beach was voted out of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee Wednesday evening on a party-line vote. The Senators said:
“William Beach does not have the qualifications to serve as Commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics. His dissertation, provided to the Committee just two days before his markup, lacks the methodological rigor of a Ph.D. in economics, let alone one of the federal government’s most important economists. It appears that little, if any, of his work has undergone the scrutiny of the scientific peer review process that would be expected of a leader in his field. And he has failed to provide the Committee with a single paper he has authored that was published in an independent academic journal.
“Instead of demonstrating independence and leadership, Dr. Beach built his career writing result-oriented policy papers for organizations like the Heritage Foundation and the Mercatus Center, which receive significant funding from the Koch brothers and other anonymous sources. Especially during this administration, the Commissioner must safeguard the Bureau’s integrity. Dr. Beach’s thin qualifications and slanted record do not suggest he will.”
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