The Trump administration’s murky handling of data, which has sparked investigations and lawsuits alleging privacy violations, has become one of the reasons people cite when declining to share their information for the federal government’s ongoing surveys, these workers say.
“I got more people asking me how I know information isn’t going to be sold or given away,” says a former field representative, who says they were met with “a lot of suspicion” and specific mentions of Elon Musk, President Trump’s billionaire adviser who set up the DOGE team, from some households they tried to interview earlier this year. The former bureau employee, who was let go as part of the Trump administration’s downsizing of the federal government, asked not to be named because they fear retaliation.
“It’s a system that runs on trust, and the trust, I would say, has been declining,” the current field representative says. “It makes me sad as an American that distrust is at that level. But I do understand it. I fear for the data I’m collecting. Is it going to be misused? And the privacy guarantees that I describe to people — are those going to be respected?”
These questions don’t surprise Nancy Bates, a former senior researcher for survey methodology at the bureau. Bates has tracked declining public participation in the census going back to the 1990 tally.
“The public doesn’t do a great job of differentiating between federal agencies, so they may think that if DOGE is getting access to Social Security, IRS, Treasury, then they’re probably getting access to the Census Bureau data as well,” Bates says.
And that, Bates fears, could hurt the bureau’s ability to produce accurate statistics.
“I would expect the problems that we already have with collecting information from marginalized communities would get worse if fears about the government having access to anything that people tell a statistical agency get worse,” says Katharine Abraham, an economist at the University of Maryland, who led the Bureau of Labor Statistics during the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations.
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