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(Bloomberg) — An advocacy group for statisticians urged House lawmakers to include a provision in a spending bill that would restrict the Census Bureau’s ability to repeatedly contact respondents, warning that the proposal could hinder the accuracy and reliability of government statistics.
The House Appropriations Committee approved a bill in September that would increase the Census’ overall budget, but would prevent the bureau from using funds “to enforce involuntary compliance, or to inquire more than twice as often as to the voluntary compliance of any survey.” The Senate version of the bill does not include similar language, and it has not yet been voted on by the full House.
Ron Wasserstein, executive director of the American Statistical Association, pressured elected officials not to adopt the provision in their final fiscal year 2026 appropriations bill.
“While this directive may appear to be cost-saving, in practice it will weaken the country’s statistical infrastructure, distorting the representativeness and destroying the accuracy of the data on which communities, businesses, and governments depend,” Wasserstein said in a letter Tuesday. “The monetary costs of additional follow-up are real, but the benefits are greater.”
A spokesperson for the House Appropriations Committee did not respond to a request for comment.
Wasserstein cited a study that shows that the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey — which is used to direct government funding and evaluate the needs of programs like education and health care — reaches about 20% of households after only two mailings. The lack of additional follow-up affects accuracy, risks excluding small populations and ultimately misdirects policies, he said.
Another consequence is the introduction of bias, as more affluent people are generally easier to access. This was an issue in the pandemic, when ACS had to scale back field operations and results were skewed toward higher-income households. Thus, the Census Bureau described the 2020 ACS as “experimental.”
The Senate spending resolution requests Census to update the Committee on ways the agency is trying to modernize the ACS, including expanding nonresponse follow-up functions.
The Census Bureau conducts more than 100 surveys and programs each year, with the ACS and the decennial census being the largest. It also publishes monthly estimates of retail sales and new home construction. The bureau co-sponsors the Current Population Survey with the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which produces the nation’s unemployment rate.
–With assistance from Megan Scully.
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