Trump's Jobs Tweet Violates Federal Rule

President Trump has violated a federal rule—again. On Friday, the president tweeted: "Excellent Jobs Numbers just released - and I have only just begun. Many job stifling regulations continue to fall. Movement back to USA!" The problem, according to CNN, is that Trump's tweet came just 15 minutes after the release of the new jobs report. A federal rule from 1985 requires officials to wait an hour before commenting on a newly released jobs report. MarketWatch reports the purpose of the rule is to keep some distance between the "policy-neutral release of data by statistical agencies and their interpretation by policy officials.”

Back in February, both Reince Priebus and Sean Spicer tweeted about the the new jobs report too quickly, as did Trump by retweeting a Drudge Report tweet. Jason Furman, former top economic adviser to President Obama, says the rule may need to be changed due to how quickly modern information moves, but it's not up to Trump to decide on his own to ignore it. Friday's jobs report showed the addition of 209,000 jobs in July and the unemployment rate dropping from 4.4% to 4.3%, the New York Times reports. The number of jobs added was above Wall Street expectations, and improvements in Trump's first six months as president are in line with improvements in the final six months of Obama's presidency. (More jobs report stories.)