A Republican-led House committee is demanding an explanation from the Labor Department over the federal agency’s leak of revised jobs data last month to a handful of Wall Street firms before it was made available to the public, The Post has learned.
The House Committee on Education and Workforce, which is chaired by Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-NC), sent a letter early Wednesday morning to the acting secretary of the Labor Department, Julie Su, asking for more information on the botched release of the revised data.
“At best, BLS’s botched release of the job numbers caused significant uncertainty and confusion and undermined confidence in the data,” the committee’s letter to Su read.
“At worst, BLS’s actions may have provided an unfair advantage to several firms.”
On the morning of Aug. 21, the Labor Department was scheduled to release its jobs revision figures at 10:00 a.m. Eastern time.
The annual “preliminary benchmark revision” showed that 818,000 fewer jobs were created in the 12-month period that ended in late March of this year — the largest downward revision in more than a decade.
But the report, which was highly anticipated as Wall Street observers were keen on learning whether there were economic indicators that would increase the likelihood of an interest rate cut by the Federal Reserve, was released to the general public more than 30 minutes past schedule.
It was later learned that a select few Wall Street firms called the BLS and obtained the data before its delayed release.
BNP Paribas, the French multinational banking giant, and Mizuho Financial Group, the Japanese lender, were among the first to get their hands on the information while others wait, Bloomberg News reported last month.
“While the public waited for the release, BLS provided the job numbers in advance of the public release to some Wall Street firms,” the GOP-led committee wrote to Su in their letter on Wednesday.
“As a result, rumors circulated on Wall Street, with some analysts able to report the correct job numbers confidently and other spreading incorrect information.”
Foxx demanded that the Labor Department reveal the “guidance and regulations governing the release of the job numbers” as well as the names of the BLS officials who leaked the numbers in advance of their release.
Email records obtained by Bloomberg News earlier this week showed that BLS staffers were frantically trying to solve the problem after they were made aware that morning that the jobs revision report was not posted to the website.
BLS employees were aware at around 10:20 a.m. that morning that the data was only visible internally and that the public could not see it on the web.
At that point, the agency was inundated with phone calls demanding answers about the unreleased report.
The emails indicated that one of the BLS employees “told some customers” the figures even as they were unavailable to the general public.
“I am so sorry if I misunderstood procedure and I accept any consequences,” one of the staffers wrote.
The Post has sought comment from the Labor Department.
