The Biden White House is scrapping a decades-old rule that bars administration officials from commenting on economic data for one hour after their release, a notice in the Federal Register indicated Wednesday.
Faced with polls showing that the public strongly disapproves of President Joe Biden’s management of economic issues, the White House is changing the rules to give them a new advantage when it comes to spinning economic data in a more favorable light.
Instead of the one-hour waiting period that has been in place since the Reagan years, administration officials will be able to weigh in on important economic releases after just half an hour.
The change will allow White House officials to comment on economic data released at 8:30 in the morning at 9:00, prior to the opening of the stock market. The risk is that officials would condition the market’s reaction. Important, often market moving data, are typically released at 8:30 a.m., including the monthly jobs and inflation reports.
The White House has early access to economic data such as the monthly jobs report from the Department of Labor, giving officials time to prepare a public response. The one-hour delay was intended to prevent administration officials with advance notice from coloring the market response by immediately putting their spin on it.
The idea was that the delay would allow markets and the public to more easily distinguish between the official, apolitical data and the interpretations of political officials.
“Except for members of the staff of the agency issuing the principal economic indicator who have been designated by the agency head to provide technical explanations of the data, employees of the executive branch shall not comment publicly on the data until at least one hour after the official release time,” the existing regulation stated
The change of the rules is the latest example of the Biden administration flouting norms that Joe Biden the candidate promised to uphold if elected.
The new, shorter gag rule comes at a time when the Biden administration is desperately attempting to improve its standing in public opinion polls. Especially on economic issues, Biden has consistently been among the least popular presidents in recent history.
White House officials have argued that the rule is outdated in a media environment when news is disseminated quickly. They claim that being able to spin data earlier will not undermine public confidence in the integrity of economic data.
When President Donald Trump considered changing the rule, he was met with a torrent of objections.
“To sustain integrity and trust in the federal statistical system, it is of utmost importance to preserve a bright line between the release of data and policy comment on that data. It must always be clear that statistical agencies are the source of the information, not the policy officials. This distinction is best accomplished by keeping the one-hour time period, regardless of advances in information dissemination technology. In fact, today’s speed for disseminating information makes it all the more important to maintain the one-hour embargo in order not to blur the distinction—in the financial markets and more broadly—between the data themselves and policy comment on the data,” the American Statistical Association argued in a comment letter.
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