Report calls for bolstering national statistics agencies with resources, protection from politics

Form from the 2020 U.S. Census. A new report warns of threats to the federal systems for collecting and analyzing data and makes recommendations for increasing resources and shielding the national statistical infrastructure from political interference. (Getty Images)

The national system of tracking numbers that count births, deaths and countless details in the lives of people and the country between those mileposts is underfunded and in danger of manipulation for political ends, according to a new report released Tuesday.

“Our bottom-line assessment is that federal statistics are at risk,” states the report, produced by the American Statistical Association (ASA) and George Mason University.

“Federal statistical agencies face increasing challenges to their ability to produce relevant, timely, credible, accurate, and objective statistics and to innovate to the extent necessary to meet the nation’s information and evidence requirements in the 21st century,” the authors write.

The report, titled “The Nation’s Data at Risk: Meeting America’s Information Needs for the 21st Century,” examines the federal government’s 13 principal agencies that produce statistical data — information that the report calls “essential U.S. infrastructure.” It is the first in what the sponsors describe as an ongoing project to measure the health of the federal government’s principal statistical agencies.

“Our professional judgment is that these [federal statistical] agencies have been overlooked in investment and innovation, which we have known for several years but feel now is the time to raise the alarm with data users and taxpayers that the system is at risk,” said Steve Pierson, a coauthor of the report and director of science policy at the ASA, in a statement announcing the study.

Margo Anderson, a history professor emerita at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, said the report outlines issues that statistics insiders have been concerned about for years. “Things are not well on the governmental statistical side,” Anderson told the Wisconsin Examiner in an interview.

Anderson has spent her career studying the demographic and social history of the United States, including the history of the U.S. census, a requirement embedded in the U.S. Constitution. Through that work and her interest in “the interrelationship between policy and politics in this country,” she has worked closely with the American Statistical Association for decades, although she was not directly involved with the production of the new report.

“They’re making the simple argument that you can’t write good policy unless you have credible, sufficient, timely and reputable information,” Anderson said of the authors.  

The authors argue that official statistics — population, employment and unemployment, jobs, health information including the frequency of specific illnesses, household incomes and much more — are not only essential to the nation’s economic prosperity, but are critical social tools.

“The importance of this infrastructure goes beyond commerce,” the report states. “Federal statistics are a core democratic institution, supporting free and fair elections, fair and impartial courts, informed civil discourse, and other vital functions that are not easily replicated by the private sector.”

While the report enumerates a series of challenges that threaten the nation’s statistics infrastructure, it’s not all doom and gloom. It acknowledges “grounds for optimism,” such as innovations made by federal statistical agencies to meet the needs for rapid data related to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The report highlights two pieces of legislation, the 2018 Foundations for Evidence-Based Policymaking Act and the 2022 CHIPS and Science Act, for provisions “responding to the need to modernize how we collect, disseminate, and use information to realize the best value for the many purposes for which federal data are used.”

Inadequate resources

But more work is needed “to bolster the statistical system as a whole and enable it to add value for policymakers and the public,” the authors write.

“If federal statistical agencies cannot produce accurate and timely data, policymakers and legislators such as members of Congress will not have trustworthy information or evidence to make essential public policy decisions or administer important programs,” they write.

Statistical agencies, they argue, need

• Much more decision-making authority on the methods and processes for collecting, estimating and disseminating statistical data “to assure data quality and protect against inappropriate political interference.”

• Strong support from the cabinet departments or other agencies of which the statistical agencies are a part, “so the statistical agency can exercise its autonomy appropriately, obtain adequate budget and staffing, and do its best work.”

• Sufficient budget and staff to carry out more than their basic responsibilities, so they can test and develop solutions that “meet demands for new, revised, and more detailed information.”

One of the most important challenges statistical agencies face is inadequate resources, the report’s authors contend. That’s an obstacle at the top, where the federal government’s chief statistician’s office has shrunk from more than 40 staff a half-century ago to 12 today. But it also shows up in other ways, such as the lack of funding to test new methods for measuring some of the core data for which they’re responsible, such as monthly economic metrics.

There are also societal and environmental challenges that impede the statistical  agencies’ current work, such as less public cooperation with surveys, a traditional source for data such as monthly unemployment statistics, the report finds.

Poorly-defended agency autonomy makes federal statistical agencies vulnerable to “political meddling and improper influence,” the report states — risking their ability to support “civil discourse and policymaking” as well as an erosion in public trust in the data they produce.

Political interference

Political interference with government data reporting has been a recurring issue over time, Anderson told the Wisconsin Examiner.

“There was huge controversy in the 1930s over whether unemployment was a real problem,” Anderson said. President Herbert Hoover, in the White House when the Great Depression started, opposed the collection of national unemployment statistics.

After Franklin Roosevelt was elected president in 1932, he established a central statistics board and assigned it to figure out how to measure the jobless rate. The tool that resulted, the monthly current population survey, took 10 years to develop, Anderson said.

In the 1980s, the Reagan administration stopped the Bureau of Labor Statistics from collecting and publishing data on labor strikes, something the government had done for a century, she said. And during his presidency, Donald Trump installed political appointees in the U.S. Census Bureau with the aim of pushing Trump’s agenda.

“The Trump administration did not see that information system of the U.S. as an asset,” Anderson said. “They saw it as the Deep State that was hampering their policy initiatives.”

One such initiative was to include a census question asking people to identify if they were citizens or not. That was ultimately blocked in court.

‘A public good’

The report includes a series of legislative recommendations to expand the agencies’ autonomy, ensure adequate and sustainable funding, allow agencies to share data more easily while building “a shared culture of responsible data access and confidentiality,” the report states.

Other recommendations focus on how the statistical agencies, their parent agencies and the White House Office of Management and Budget, in which the chief statistician resides, each operate as they participate in managing the nation’s statistical infrastructure.

“The Nation’s Data at Risk” heads off the suggestion that private companies can replace the work of government agencies in producing critical national data.

“Federal statistics are a public good,” the report states. “Just like our national defense and national parks systems, the public is best served when the federal government collects and disseminates critically needed data. The private sector may produce many useful statistics, but businesses do not commonly have an economic incentive to produce the kinds of comprehensive, high-quality data produced by federal statistical agencies.”

The report was two years in the making — begun long before the publication of the Heritage Foundation “Project 2025” document that details a complete overhaul of the federal government should the former president win November’s election. “Project 2025” includes proposals to downsize the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and privatize the National Weather Service.

While “The Nation’s Data at Risk” wasn’t published in direct reaction to the Heritage document, Anderson suggested it serves as a pointed rejoinder.

“ASA is, in some senses, laying down a marker, saying, ‘We know what you’re up to,’” she said. “‘If you go there, you’re going to have to deal with all of us.’”

Correction: This report has been updated to state that in the 1980s the Reagan administration stopped publishing data on labor strikes, not price statistics.

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