This post has been updated.
In 1971, President Richard M. Nixon did not like the unemployment data coming out of the Bureau of Labor Statistics. So he terminated the bureau’s press conferences, senior career statisticians were removed and a new outside deputy commissioner for data analysis was appointed. Congressional hearings and investigations followed. After Nixon left office, reforms were enacted.
Fast-forward five decades. The 2020 Census is being insidiously damaged. Not since the Nixon administration interfered in employment data has such partisan interference affected the production of federal statistics. Congress urgently needs to protect the accuracy of this year’s count.
Because of complications stemming from the pandemic, Census Bureau officials have said they need more time to conduct door-to-door visits. The House passed a three-month extension of the Dec. 31 deadline to submit census data. The Senate must act to make an extension law.
We served as chief statistician of the United States for a collective 27 years. It was our job to safeguard the objectivity, integrity and quality of federal statistics. We implemented policies and safeguards to ensure that census data, the unemployment rate, trade figures and other key indicators of our nation’s well-being were not tampered with to favor the political party in power. We see warning signs that the 2020 Census needs protection.
The census is a vast, complex undertaking. After a decade of planning and testing, the Census Bureau hires and trains more than 500,000 employees to count everyone from remote Alaska to southern Florida. Census workers visit all homes that haven’t responded to mailed surveys. They drop off questionnaires in rural areas. They count people in group settings, such as nursing homes and prisons, and those who lack permanent shelter. Processing the information gathered takes months. To count everyone once and in the right place, missing information must be identified and filled in, duplicate responses removed and geographic boundaries checked.
These efforts take time. Discouragingly, census self-response rates have been uneven across the country and particularly low in the rural South. As of late August, only about 65 percent of households self-responded. An additional 20 percent have been enumerated through in-person interviews, which do not always find people at home or locate those who have moved. Field activities were curtailed earlier this year because of the pandemic, and high turnover among field workers has left the bureau understaffed. Spending an extra month in the field during this national emergency is common sense. A federal court has temporarily blocked the administration efforts to wind down operations, with another hearing to come later this month. Those who would rush the census should have to say why: to what end? Making sure field operations and post-data collection processing are carried out properly will result in a far more accurate count.
But the pandemic is not the only threat to accuracy. For the first time in U.S. history, the president has directed the Census Bureau to delete from its count those people who may not be citizens, potentially lowering the numbers in areas with large immigrant populations. The White House has also embedded three high-level political appointees into the nonpartisan agency to oversee production of the numbers. These actions, coming late in the census process, at minimum foster the perception of political interference, which calls into question the Census Bureau’s independence.
An inaccurate count has repercussions beyond wasting $15 billion in taxpayer money. Census results apportion congressional seats among the states and guide the distribution of billions of dollars annually through Medicare, maternal and child health services, community mental health services, and other programs. Federal education spending calculations are based on census counts. That’s 10 years of funding toward school supplies, meals for low-income students and other resources. Businesses rely on census data to decide where to build plants and expand markets that create jobs.
Transparency and objectivity are essential if census results are to be trusted and used. Four former Census Bureau directors requested last month that Congress charge an independent institution with establishing metrics to assess the quality of the 2020 Census and recommend a course of action if the data gathered do not meet federal standards. Outside expertise has been enlisted before, and the National Academy of Sciences and the American Statistical Association have deep experience studying the census that would suit them to this task.
As chief statisticians, we developed — and the Office of Management and Budget issued — extensive standards to ensure information quality complied with the law. Federal agencies must consider and document quality at each step: collection, processing and dissemination. The Trump administration’s current actions do not meet OMB requirements or the Census Bureau’s own quality guidelines. Existing safeguards have not been sufficient to deter efforts to derail one of our country’s most fundamental civic activities. Congress must act to keep federal statistics independent from partisan interference.
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