By Ann Saphir
Jan 9 (Reuters) - U.S. President Donald Trump posted a chart on his social media account late on Thursday that included job-market data that was not publicly released until Friday morning, a break with long-standing practice the White House said was inadvertent.
The chart, which has been liked nearly 14,000 times by other Truth Social users, showed the economy added 654,000 private-sector jobs since January, and had 181,000 fewer government jobs, figures that were only published by the Labor
Department on Friday in its closely watched December jobs report. The president typically gets the jobs report a day early. Bloomberg News reported the apparent breach earlier.
"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. "The White House is accordingly reviewing protocols regarding economic data releases."
The chart Trump posted cited the Labor Department's Bureau of Labor Statistics and calculations by the Council of Economic Advisers as its sources.
Trump indicated in comments to reporters at the White House that he was not responsible. "I said, 'post them whenever you get a chance,'" he said.
Kevin Hassett, who leads the White House National Economic Council, receives an advance look at the monthly jobs report as permitted by law. He and a handful of other officials with access are free to share the market-sensitive data with the president before it is made public. Hassett is currently under consideration by Trump to become the next head of the Federal Reserve.
But a rule dating from the mid-1980s from the White House Office of Management and Budget governing the release of embargoed economic data forbids executive branch employees from public discussion of the data within an hour of its release.
It is not the first time, though, that Trump has appeared to have flouted the long-standing embargo on what is more-often-than-not a market-moving government news release, anticipated by traders of stocks, bonds, currencies and countless other assets from around the world.
In June 2018, about an hour before the monthly jobs report for May was due to be released, Trump posted to his then-Twitter account a cryptic message: "Looking forward to seeing the employment numbers at 8:30 this morning."
Users shared the post thousands of times, with many assuming the president's coy boast indicated the figure would be stronger than expected. Indeed it was: Job creation that month came in 35,000 positions stronger than economists had forecast and the jobless rate fell to 3.8%.
In that case, it did not appear as though Trump's tip moved the market ahead of the scheduled release, and the same appears to have been the case this time. S&P 500 e-mini futures slipped a couple of points following his post at 8:21 p.m. ET, well into the sleepy overnight trading session for U.S. equity index futures. Volume of trades per minute remained below 200 contracts.
It would have been difficult to parse from Trump's post on Thursday evening the precise private-sector job creation figure for December - a less-than-expected 37,000 - because the cumulative figure he posted included revisions to the prior two months totaling a negative 70,000 between the two.
Also it is not unusual for U.S. job growth to come exclusively from the private sector, along the lines of what Trump was boasting. From the summer of 2010 through early 2014, for instance, about 8 million private-sector jobs were created while more than 750,000 government jobs were lost during the era of "sequestration" that involved across-the-board federal budget cuts.
Trump has cut federal government jobs since his return, with a decline of 277,000 federal jobs since January. State governments have also shed some jobs in that run, but local governments have added to their payrolls.
(Reporting by Ann Saphir, Howard Schneider, and Andrea Shalal; Editing by Rod Nickel and Andrea Ricci)
