Donald Trump accused of leaking “market-sensitive data”
President Donald Trump has been accused of releasing embargoed “market-sensitive data” before these were made public on Friday.
On Thursday evening, Trump posted a graph to Truth Social showing aggregate changes in private and government employment in 2025, which incorporated data from the jobs report the Department of Labor released the next morning.
“Donald Trump’s decision to leak market-sensitive data was nothing but an attempt to distract from his failing economy,” Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts posted to X on Monday.
One White House official called Trump’s post an “inadvertent public disclosure of aggregate data that was partially derived from prereleased information” in a statement to Newsweek.
Why It Matters
According to The Associated Press, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) tightly restricts access to the data contained in its inflation and jobs reports. However, it provides advance copies to the White House under strict confidentiality agreements to prepare summaries for the president ahead of their official release. Meanwhile, the Office of Management and Budget bars executive branch officials from commenting on this data ahead of time, while also forbidding any public commentary until at least 30 minutes after their publication.
This secrecy is intended to prevent the sensitive, nonpublic information from being disseminated and prematurely influencing financial markets. These early disclosure concerns are particularly acute in the case of the monthly Employment Situation report—considered one of the most closely watched economic releases worldwide.
What To Know
The post from Trump on Thursday, now liked nearly 18,000 times, showed that private sector payrolls had increased by 654,000 over the course of 2025, as the economy shed 181,000 government jobs. Following the official release on Friday, many realized that these figures incorporated numbers from the report.
Trump downplayed concerns about the early insight he had given into the jobs figures, telling reporters on Friday he had not done so deliberately.
“They gave me some numbers,” he said. “When people give me things, I post them.”
And a White House official told Newsweek that the media was “grasping at straws” regarding Trump’s premature post, and said the focus should be on how his policies were “laying the groundwork for an economic resurgence as GDP [gross domestic product] and real wage growth continue to accelerate.”
When eventually released, the figures themselves came in slightly below expectations, with the economy adding 50,000 jobs in December compared with a consensus forecast of 60,000. The unemployment rate dropped to 4.4 percent from a revised 4.5 percent in November, but remains higher than the 4 percent recorded when Trump returned to office in January.
The addition of 50,000 payrolls last month means employers added a total of 584,000 jobs in 2025, down from 2 million in 2024 and marking the weakest year for employment growth since 2020.
What People Are Saying
A White House official told Newsweek: “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 prereleased information.”
What Happens Next
The BLS is scheduled to release its next monthly employment report for January on February 7.
The official who spoke to Newsweek said the White House would be “accordingly reviewing protocols regarding economic data releases” following the incident.
