// HACKER NEWS — CYBERSECURITY
Political meddling at the Census Bureau damages the US statistical system
PIIE gratefully acknowledges financial support from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation for the research presented in this article, and several more to come on the economic statistical system. The research was conducted independently; funders are never given the right to review a publication before its release.
This summer marks the worst period for US statistical integrity since President Donald Trump fired the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics last August. Two different and seemingly uncoordinated events at the Census Bureau raised alarms about inappropriate political encroachment on the scientific and technical authority of the agency.
I take some comfort that journalists and independent experts spoke up quickly and loudly. I still trust the economic indicators we get from the expert staff at Census and other US government statistical agencies, like inflation data and the jobs report. But I am scrutinizing any technical changes more closely and am quicker to look for political influence.
During this administration, the statistical system has suffered attrition, leadership vacancies, cuts, delays, and political interventions in methods and content. Most of these developments are the result of collateral damage rather than intentional harm. But the examples of deliberate political intervention have grown, including these latest events at Census.
These two events—the publication of a brief on the official Census platform about noncitizen voting that fell far short of Census standards and a political decision about privacy-protection methods—are new harms. The main impact is likely to be on demographic data for voting and redistricting, and on local demographic and economic data. The headline-worthy macroeconomic data that policymakers, financial markets, and the media follow closely were spared this time around. But damage to any part of the statistical system reverberates throughout the system. These events demonstrate that the Census Bureau and other agencies are increasingly vulnerable to political interference that would harm their credibility and the ability of businesses and policymakers to make the data-driven decisions that affect Americans' daily lives.
The clearer case of political encroachment was a brief published by the Census Bureau on August 18 that "readily determined with high confidence" that more than 24,000 voter records in the 2020 election represented noncitizens. The brief is formatted like other Census research briefs and reports but—in a departure from standard practice—named no authors and included no acknowledgements or contact information for any staff or team. NPR reported that the analysis was not conducted by career Census civil servants and that the team that generated the brief included individuals affiliated with the Trump-aligned America First Policy Institute.
The analysis linked a commercial voter file containing registration and 2020 turnout records to federal administrative records containing information that can be used to classify people as noncitizens, drawn from multiple sources including Social Security and immigration data. John Abowd, the former head of research and methodology at Census, wrote that previous Census evaluations of its record-linkage system found false-match rates high enough that the true number of noncitizen voters is probably much lower: "[T]he alleged 'noncitizen voters' are therefore much more likely to be data errors than noncitizen voters." Amy O'Hara, who formerly led Census research on administrative data, wrote that the report "lacks methodological rigor, transparency, and accountability, and the results should be discarded. Moreover, the Census Bureau should answer for the process concerns raised by the publication of this unsigned and shoddy report."
This looks bad! All administrations publish data to support their policy goals or political arguments. But authorship and accountability must be clear. Typically, administrations advocate for their vie