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Key Takeaways
- President Donald Trump posted a graph on social media Thursday night that revealed information about the as-yet-unpublished jobs report scheduled for Friday morning.
- The Bureau of Labor Statistics tries to prevent early release of information to ensure no one gains an unfair trading advantage from the data.
- The White House said the early release was inadvertent, and it was taking steps to prevent it from happening again.
If you wanted to know how the jobs market was doing at the end of the year, you could have waited until Friday morning’s highly anticipated December jobs report—or you could have gotten the information early by following President Donald Trump’s social media feed.
Late Thursday, about 12 hours before the scheduled release of the data, Trump posted a graph prepared by the Council of Economic Advisors on his Truth Social platform showing job creation figures since January.
When the Bureau of Labor Statistics published the official jobs report Friday morning, the data matched what Trump had posted the night before: U.S. employers added just 473,000 jobs from February through December, marking the slowest pace of job creation outside of a recession since 2003. Trump’s post highlighted the fact that the private sector had accounted for all new jobs created over the period, while the number of government jobs had fallen sharply.
Why This Is Important
The government’s monthly employment report is among the most important data releases for financial markets given the influence it has on the Federal Reserve’s decisions about interest rates. An unauthorized release of the data could give certain investors an unfair advantage.
The BLS and other statistical agencies have policies against releasing any data before the official publication time to ensure that everyone gets the information all at once. Data on inflation and job creation, in particular, can move financial markets and is valuable to traders and investors.
The BLS is allowed to give data early to the White House Council of Economic Advisors only under the condition that there is “no release prior to the official release time” according to an OMB directive from 2024.
“Following the regular procedure of presidents being prebriefed on economic data releases, there was an inadvertent public disclosure of aggregate data that was partially derived from pre-released information,” a White House official said in an email to Investopedia. “The White House is accordingly reviewing protocols regarding economic data releases.”
The incident echoes an episode in 2018 when Trump posted on Twitter that he was “looking forward” to seeing the jobs report, which observers correctly guessed meant the report showed a healthy amount of job creation, Bloomberg reported.
