President Donald Trump is ramping up his attacks on the vast network of government data collection, leaving some statisticians and demographers worried the president is undermining the short- and long-term credibility of federal data.
Trump’s announcement of a mid-decade census on Thursday came less than a week after he fired Bureau of Labor Statistics commissioner Erika McEntarfer following the release of a jobs report that painted an unfavorable picture of the economy.
The added strain of a new census comes after the Department of Government Efficiency cut five Census Bureau surveys, saving $16.5 million. DOGE did not specify which surveys it cut when it made the announcement in June.
Mary Jo H. Mitchell, co-director of the Census Project, a coalition group made up of local, state and national advocates for quality census data, said ordering a new census will subvert the planning for the 2030 census, which has been underway for years.
Project 2025, the conservative policy blueprint published by Trump allies ahead of last year’s election, calls for stronger “political leadership” at statistics agencies like the Census Bureau, and recommends those agencies be consolidated together under the Commerce Department.
By dragging the federal data into political debates, statisticians and economists worry that Trump may permanently erode trust in critically important data used by the government to apportion resources, write legislation and distribute funds — and by the private sector to track a slate of key market factors.
“These data, if they’re compromised, really undermine not just big decisions that policy makers have to make at the local, state and federal level, but everyday decisions people have to make about how they want to manage their lives,” the Census Project’s Mitchell said. “And once we’ve done that, it’s going to be really hard, I think, for people to trust the data again.”
Add new comment