Sen. Elizabeth Warren, a Democrat from Massachusetts, speaks during an April hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C.
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Cliff Owen/AP
Trump administration officials are facing new demands from Congress to explain why the Census Bureau’s parent agency removed language banning political interference from its scientific integrity policy.
In letters sent Wednesday to Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and other officials, Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, the top Democrat on the Senate Banking Committee, cites NPR’s reporting on the change and raises concerns about how it could hurt the reliability of statistics about the country’s demographics and economy.
“Amid the Trump Administration’s broader assault on the integrity of the nation’s statistical system, in which you and the Department have played a key role, you owe the public a clear explanation of why the Department removed this language and how it arrived at this decision,” Warren wrote to Lutnick, who oversees the Census Bureau as the head of the Commerce Department.
The updated policy no longer says that “protection from inappropriate influence” is among the “hallmarks of scientific integrity.” That and other unannounced revisions, dated Aug. 19, came a day after the bureau released a highly unusual document by a team with ties to the America First Policy Institute, a think tank started by officials from President Trump’s first administration. NPR first reported on the team’s ties to AFPI. Data and election experts have criticized the document’s claims about non-U.S. citizen voting as questionable and below the standards for research by the bureau.
The Trump administration has made other controversial moves in recent months with major implications for official statistics.
In June, the administration banned a data privacy protection technique that the Census Bureau had used for decades, forcing the agency to delay the release of some survey results and potentially cut future public data about rural communities and other small populations.
And this month, it proposed that the census, for the first time in U.S. history, exclude certain non-U.S. citizen residents from a count that determines each state’s share of congressional districts and Electoral College votes. The 14th Amendment says that count must include the “whole number of persons in each state.” The administration is also calling for another unprecedented change: to stop using the census to produce data about people’s race and ethnicity.
“That [census proposal] and other proposed changes would have sweeping implications for the quality of our economic data, the redistricting process that determines congressional representation, the Federal Reserve’s monetary policy decisions that rely upon key employment statistics and [Bureau of Economic Analysis] inflation data, and our ability to enforce civil rights and other laws,” Warren wrote.
Warren is probing whether the Commerce Department’s decision to remove the political-interference ban involved the Office of Management and Budget, a White House agency that coordinates federal statistical agencies. The senator is also asking how the Federal Reserve is making sure that the data it relies on from the Census Bureau is accurate.
In a statement, spokesperson Eric Kollig says the Fed plans to respond to Warren’s letter, which asks for detailed answers by Oct. 7.
Spokespeople for the Commerce Department and OMB did not immediately respond to NPR’s requests for comment.
Edited by Benjamin Swasey
