White House says it’s ‘reviewing protocols’ after Trump seemingly violated federal policy by disclosing jobs data early

The White House said Friday that it is “reviewing protocols” around economic data releases after President Donald Trump appeared to disclose sensitive jobs information ahead of its official publication, a move that economists described as “unprecedented” and potentially in violation of long-standing federal policy.

In a statement provided on background, a White House official said the episode stemmed from “an inadvertent public disclosure” following routine presidential briefings on economic data.

This occurred “following the regular procedure of presidents being prebriefed on economic data releases,” the official said. “The White House is accordingly reviewing protocols regarding economic data releases.”

The official bristled at the criticism of the disclosure, arguing that media coverage had overplayed its significance.

“Instead of grasping at straws to foment another fake controversy, however, the media would be better off covering what today’s job report actually shows,” the official said, adding that President Trump’s policies are “laying the groundwork for an economic resurgence as GDP and real wage growth continue to accelerate.”

The comments come after Trump posted an image to Truth Social late Thursday evening that included figures from Friday morning’s nonfarm payrolls report, hours before the data was released publicly by the Bureau of Labor Statistics at 8:30 a.m. ET.

Office of Management and Budget policy bars executive branch officials from commenting on or releasing market-moving economic statistics prior to their official publication, and also prohibits public statements until at least 30 minutes after release. While presidents are briefed on jobs data in advance, those briefings are treated as confidential.

Bharat Kumar, an economist at the financial firm Futures First, spotted that the figures in Trump’s post matched the final numbers released Friday morning. Economist and professor at University of Michigan Justin Wolfers said on X the disclosure “unprecedented,” saying no prior White House had ever released market-moving jobs data ahead of schedule.  

“No serious country does this,” Wolfers wrote.

The figures would have been difficult to interpret, anyway, because the large revisions to earlier months meant that the actually new numbers could not be cleanly isolated to show what happened in December alone, Nick Timaraos, the Wall Street Journal’s chief economics correspondent, noted. 

Friday’s jobs report showed nonfarm payrolls increased by 50,000 in December, with nearly all of the gains coming from healthcare and social assistance. Stocks edged higher following the release, easing fears of a sharper employment slowdown.

The leak had drawn limited attention before Kumar’s post, likely because the disclosure occurred on Truth Social, a platform with a very small audience. According to Pew Research Center, just 3% of U.S. adults say they have ever used Truth Social, compared with 84% who use YouTube, 71% Facebook, 50% Instagram, and 21% X.

Some media outlets, instead of decrying a scandal, had fun with that element of the mishap, with the Financial Times’ voicey Alphaville paraphrasing the old hypothetical about a tree falling in the forest: “If a jobs report leaks on a social media platform no one uses, does it move the market?” (This reporter was delayed in filing this story because Truth Social appeared to malfunction, preventing access to both the post and the President’s page.)

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com