Trump, Obama and the Jobs Report Former Obama officials and the press are suddenly deeply concerned about economic data disclosures.James Freeman
https://www.wsj.com/articles/trump-obama-and-the-jobs-report-1528137323
The outrage over President Trump’s Friday jobs tweet may be fake, but there’s a real issue here over the way our government should communicate.
Here’s the story: On Friday, more than an hour before the release of the Department of Labor’s monthly jobs report, the President tweeted, “Looking forward to seeing the employment numbers at 8:30 this morning.”
The report turned out to include plenty of good news—more job creation than expected and an encouraging increase in wages, particularly for those on the lower rungs of the economic ladder. But the President’s vague early tweet sparked an intense reaction from former aides to his predecessor and from many members of the press corps.
“Trump Touts Jobs Report Before Official Release, Breaking Protocol,” announced a New York Times headline on Friday. It was just one of many reports focusing on the President’s early tweet.
President Trump “has proven he cannot be trusted with the information,” proclaimed former Obama White House aide Aaron Sojourner.
Jason Furman, who served as Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers during President Obama’s second term, addresses the issue with an op-ed in the Journal:
If—69 minutes before the numbers were set to be released—President Obama had signaled via Twitter that they were going to be great, I’d have been shocked.
A president who signals advance news about economic data invites concern that he also is bragging about the good news privately, which could result in the information’s exploitation for enormous private gain by some well-connected investor.
The handling of such data certainly requires great care. But it’s not clear just how shocking such an event would have been during Mr. Obama’s second term. Mr. Furman has raised—without evidence—the possibility that Mr. Trump might privately share non-public jobs data. What about Mr. Obama?
The Journal reported on Friday:
While disclosures of economic data are rare, they aren’t unprecedented. In February 2009, with the U.S. economy in crisis and Congress debating a stimulus package, then-Senate majority leader Harry Reid (D., Nev.) heard from Mr. Obama around midnight that the following morning’s jobs report numbers “would be somewhat scary,” he told the Senate after the report’s release. The Labor Department reported a loss of 598,000 jobs in January. CONTINUE AT SITE
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