President Trump appeared to scoop his own agency experts on Thursday night, posting new employment data hours before the Bureau of Labor Statistics released its latest jobs report.
The president took to Truth Social to share a chart showing the private sector added 654,000 jobs “since January,” accounting for all new job creation in that period as federal government employment plunged.
That aligned with data the BLS released Friday at 8:30 a.m. ET – about 12 hours after Trump made his social media post, as Bloomberg first reported.
“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 told The Post in a statement, adding that they are currently reviewing protocols around economic data releases.
“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: President Trump’s policies are laying the groundwork for an economic resurgence as GDP and real wage growth continue to accelerate.”
While the Truth Social post didn’t include specific payroll figures for last month, it may have indicated the overall direction of the full report to investors, Bloomberg noted.
The outlet calculated that private employers added 687,000 jobs from January through November. Friday’s BLS report stated employers added 525,000 jobs in all of 2025, factoring in big job cuts at the federal government.
The president has faced scrutiny for his handling of government info — some of it highly sensitive — since his first term.
On one occasion in 2018, Trump tweeted that he was “looking forward” to the latest batch of employment numbers an hour before they came out, signaling good news for investors. The post marked a departure from longstanding presidential practices, observers noted at the time.
In 2019, he tweeted a classified image from a spy satellite of a rocket that had exploded on a launch pad in Iran.
In 2022, boxes containing classified information were found at his Mar-a-Lago, Fla., home, including documents that were marked as highly classified. That led to a federal probe Trump characterized as a witch hunt and which got dropped after he won the 2024 election.
National Archives representatives have said that every administration since President Reagan has mishandled top-secret documents during their term.
