(Bloomberg) — An advocacy group for statisticians urged House lawmakers to strike a provision in a spending bill that would restrict the Census Bureau’s ability to repeatedly contact respondents, cautioning the proposal could hamper the accuracy and reliability of government statistics.
The House Appropriations Committee approved a bill in September that would increase Census’s overall budget, but prohibit the bureau from using the funds “to enforce involuntary compliance, or to inquire more than twice for voluntary compliance with any survey.” The Senate’s version of the bill does not include the same language, and it hasn’t been voted on yet by the full House.
Ron Wasserstein, executive director of the American Statistical Association, pressed elected officials not to adopt the provision in its final fiscal 2026 appropriations bill.
“While this directive might appear to reduce costs, it would, in practice, undermine the nation’s statistical infrastructure, distort representation, and erode the precision 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 didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Wasserstein cited a study that shows the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey — which is used to help guide government funding and evaluate needs for programs like education and healthcare — only reaches about 20% of households after two mailings. Lack of additional follow-up impacts precision, risks excluding smaller populations and ultimately misdirects policies, he said.
Another consequence is the introduction of bias, as more affluent people are generally easier to reach. That was an issue in the pandemic, when the ACS had to scale back field operations and results skewed toward higher-income households. As such, the Census Bureau characterized the 2020 ACS as “experimental.”
The Senate’s spending proposal requests the Census to update the committee on ways the agency is trying to modernize the ACS, including expanding nonresponse follow-up operations.
The Census Bureau administers over 100 surveys and programs each year, with the ACS and decennial census among 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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