About an hour before the Labor Department released its closely watched jobs number Friday, President Donald Trump was already talking up its contents.
“Looking forward to seeing the employment numbers at 8:30 this morning,” he tweeted at 7:21 a.m. ET.
The May jobs report was in fact a good one for a president who likes to brag about the strong jobs market. Unemployment fell to 3.8%, which matched the lowest rate in nearly a half century. Employers added 223,000 jobs in the month, more than more economists were forecasting.
But investors weren’t waiting for the official report. Stock futures, bond yields and the value of the dollar all jumped higher immediately after his tweet.
And that might be why the tweet was a problem.
The Labor Department works hard to keep the market-moving numbers a secret ahead of their 8:30 a.m. ET release. Reporters who get access to the data ahead of time are in a “lock-up,” without the ability to communicate with the outside world.
And there is a federal rule dictating that federal employees who know the jobs numbers ahead of time must keep them secret.
“All employees of the executive branch who receive prerelease distribution of information and data estimates…are responsible for assuring that there is no release prior to the official release time,” says the rule, which has been in effect since at least 1985.
The question is whether the president’s comment “looking forward to” constitutes commenting on the data. The tweet certainly suggested that a good number was coming.
“This certainly was a no-no,” tweeted Ari Fleisher, who was press secretary for President George W. Bush. “The advance info is sacrosanct – not to be shared.”
The rule further specifies that federal employees other than Labor Department staff charged with issuing the report cannot publicly comment on the data for the first hour after the release time, let alone ahead of the report.
The rule also specifies that the president, through the chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors, should get the prereleased data as soon as it is available.
The White House press office did not immediately respond to questions about whether the president had seen the report when he made the tweet, or whether or not it believed the tweet was a violation of the rule.
There have been controversies in the past when federal officials have made more innocuous comments about the general state of the labor market in the hours ahead of the report, without referring to the jobs report itself, said William Rodgers, who served as the chief economist of the Labor Department.
“Perception is reality,” said Rodgers, now a professor at Rutgers University. “Any public official should know that and practice discretion.”
— CNNMoney’s Matt Egan contributed to this report.
