President Trump disclosed U.S. jobs data the day before the Department of Labor released hiring numbers for December, a closely watched economic report on Wall Street that can sway financial markets. 

At 8:20 p.m. EST on Thursday, Mr. Trump posted a graph depicting changes in private and government employment since January 2025. When the full jobs report was released Friday morning, it became clear that Mr. Trump's post had incorporated the December employment data because the totals in the chart matched figures released in the monthly report.

Mr. Trump brushed off the incident. "I don't know if they posted them," he told reporters Friday afternoon. "They gave me some numbers. When people give me things, I post them."

A White House official told CBS News that Mr. Trump's post came after he was briefed on the employment numbers, calling it an "inadvertent public disclosure of aggregate data that was partially derived from pre-released information." 

The White House is now reviewing its protocols for economic data releases, the official added.

Cooler hiring

The government's latest jobs report shows that hiring cooled in December, with employers adding 50,000 jobs, while the nation's unemployment rate ticked down to 4.4%. The economy added roughly 584,000 jobs for all of 2024, down from more than 2 million in 2024, labor data shows.

Federal economic data is held under strict embargo until its scheduled release because the information has the potential to move financial markets. Providing some investors with access to such data could allow them to place trades based on knowledge unavailable to other investors.

White House economic officials are provided with an advance copy of the Labor Department's employment report each month on Thursday afternoon and sign agreements to keep the numbers confidential, though they also write up a summary for the president, according to the Associated Press.

Data leaks can undermine investor confidence, as markets expect officials to keep a tight lid on economic reports until they're released publicly, Mark Luschini, chief investment strategist at Janney Montgomery Scott, told CBS News.

"Markets don't react kindly to that, because obviously it means that perhaps a select few may have been able to front-run on that news ahead of the market at large," he said.

Erica Groshen, a former commissioner at the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the unit that compiles the monthly employment figures, said that premature disclosures of the agency's data can be punished by fines and even jail time. But previous breaches typically have been met with a slap on the wrist, she noted. 

The Securities and Exchange Commission didn't immediately respond to a request for comment on Mr. Trump's inadvertent data release. 

No market disruption

Although some investors could have acted on the information Mr. Trump posted on Thursday, there were no evident signs of a change in trading or market prices related to the jobs data, said Adam Crisafulli, head of investment adviser Vital Knowledge.

Mr. Trump's data provided only a partial snapshot of the December labor market, while most investors are looking for the overall monthly data, including the most recent unemployment rate, he added. 

"For people who are kind of really trying to get a sense of the economy, they want to look at the full release," Crisafulli said.