Republican push to make U.S. census surveys voluntary alarms statisticians
science.org
science.org
The last time, during the last census, the census worker asked me why. I asked her if she knew about census data being used to round up U.S. citizens with unpopular ancestry and put them into concentration camps. She didn't, so I told her a little about the Japanese internment when my father was a teenager, and that I too have unpopular ancestry, and would prefer not to be on their list. She was agreeable.
Regardless, this is actually about the ACS anyways.
People threatening or attacking census workers isn't uncommon. This article is from 2010 and due to increased political polarization, it would probably be worse today:
https://www.npr.org/2010/06/21/127988332/census-workers-face...
True. But it’s about the data, right? I worked the 2010 census in my town. Obviously there is the escalation from mail-in to visit. But I recall there was some additional level after a refusal. In other words they don’t just treat a non-responsive or hostile home as a vacant lot.
There's a good chance I'm overthinking it and being paranoid, but I'd never have had that resistance under any other Republican administration in the past.
There have been no prosecutions or even fines for failing to respond to the census in more then fifty years. So de jure involuntary, de facto voluntary.
I’m not defending what the Republicans are doing. I’m just clarifying it, so at least people can discuss what’s actually happening instead of having knee jerk reactions.
My biggest complaint about it is it’s used a ton by private sector so it’s basically government sponsored research for companies.
If I had to guess, commercial organizations have access to more invasive and higher quality data that they obtain through credit card companies, lexus-nexus or other data brokers. This attitude mostly harms organizations involved in the social sciences.
We mainly used it as cheap check of things and checksum against data we were getting. Without it, it would have been big blow.
The reason for the census comes directly from the US constitution and its only stated purpose there is to redistribute congressional districts and Electoral College electors.
My own personal opinion favors giving government as much access to data as possible because contrary to what many people claim government is overwhelmingly more productive compared to the private sector.
Whoa, that's a very strong statement that requires some refinement I think.
In any case, I understand the claimed reasons, but I remain skeptical. Sometimes making something "voluntary" is not in the interests of freedom or small government. I'm sure the founding fathers were aware of that.
> to redistribute congressional districts and Electoral College electors
That's extremely important and has been used to "remarkable" effect in recent years.
Yes, but much of that refinement would be the gritty details of pushing back on awful self-serving definitions that were carefully crafted to mislead. Flouting them altogether is a strong opener.
Contrast to the boring analytical speech: "The notion of value espoused by neoliberal economics is wealth-weighted while the colloquial definition of the word does not have a wealth-weight attached, sometimes even the opposite (see: feeding orphans). This loophole is large enough to march 1000 elephants through and wage a class war. "Value Creation" is not about doing what people want, it's about doing what wealth-weighted people want, and as inequality grows that increasingly means doing what rich people want, which is primarily to pump assets so that they can get paid for being rich. This twist of terminology is how you can brainwash someone into thinking that enshittification, in all its forms, is somehow for the greater good, when it's actually just for the good of rich people who want to get paid for being rich."
The boring analytical speech is theoretically the stronger argument, but if theoretically stronger arguments won elections we wouldn't be here. So the best move is just to reverse-uno the "government bad, drown it in a bathtub, private sector good" propaganda.
It seems that people will only willingly act in the common good for small communities; at the level of government, you either enforce the common good, or you take advantage of greed and try to loosely direct it into the interests of the common good. Right now there is an argument to be made that we are not successfully achieving the latter strategy as "Value Creation" is now a bastardization of its original intent. But the former option is too diabolical to consider.
People always make this about public vs private sector but in my experience, it has more to do with the size of the organization. Large private sector organizations are just as susceptible to the slow-as-molasses bureaucratic processes as big government. Similarly, I have seen local governments be as fast-moving and agile as a startup. The simple reality is, the more people and processes are involved, the longer things take.
Corrected title:
"Republican bills would make the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey voluntary and bar enforcing mandatory responses to any census survey, citing privacy concerns and raising data-quality warnings."
"Language in a pending 2026 spending bill written by the Republican-led U.S. House of Representatives goes further. It would make both the ACS and the regular 10-year census voluntary, and would also prohibit the agency from reaching out more than once to anyone who doesn’t initially respond."
That text included a link to the bill: https://docs.house.gov/meetings/AP/AP00/20250910/118544/BILL...
From that bill I imagine they mean (page 146)
"SEC. 605. None of the funds in this Act may be used to enforce involuntary compliance, or to inquire more than twice for voluntary compliance with any survey conducted by the Bureau of the Census."
"What poor/vulnerable people? There's none in the US, look at the census data! Clearly we don't need to do anything for them!"
FTA:
"The ACS, an offshoot of the decennial census, contains roughly 70 questions on housing, employment, education, health, military service, and other demographic details. Each question has been ordered by Congress or requested by an agency to carry out its mission. “But some of them are pretty invasive,” says a spokesperson for Steube, citing questions about when someone begins their daily commute to work and whether they have difficulty getting dressed."
They're sensitive, not invasive. And the whole point is to find out if there are people with sensitive needs, so we can help them.
The Republican party just doesn't like the idea of helping people. Anything that could improve people's lives gives them the willies.
I don't understand why it became a 70 question survey you are forced to answer. A core value of America is our right to obstruct any government attempt to improve our lives and I defend that stubborness.
Nobody tell this guy about how the interstate highways got built. Or about how we eradicated a dozen diseases. Or how civilization works, in general.
I think this is a reinvention of history, because much of American history, and the writings of the founders, do not seem to imply this. The core value to my understanding is "no taxation without representation", probably followed by freedom of speech (from government). I don't think this is true anymore though, given how many people are happy for the king to impose taxes on them at will.
https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/in-depth/564560/the-traditional-c...
So maybe it has nothing to do with US politics and is just a worldwide trend?
This change was still a significant issue more than four years later in the 2015 election. The long-form census was re-instated the day after the Liberal government took power and people were genuinely happy to fill out their 2016 census.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Canadian_census#Voluntary...
I think we can all guess how this will turn out down south.
I did not forsee what we see today: blatant attempts to maintain power through force and subversion of the electoral system.
Honestly given US history (slavery, individualism etc) I'm surprised democracy has lasted so long here. The Economist rates the US as a "flawed democracy", it has been undergoing erosion for a long time.
The word “democracy” comes from ancient Greece, most famously Athens - the term was coined to refer to Cleisthenes‘ reforms in the 5th century BCE - prior to that point only upper class men could vote, the “democratic” reforms extended voting rights to all male citizens who had completed their military training - so excluding women, slaves, freed slaves, resident foreigners, and men who hadn’t completed military training (which normally started around 18 and went for two years) - so only 10% to 20% of the population could vote, although that was still a lot more than prior to the reforms-before the reforms, power was limited to the top 1% or so of men, who came from the wealthiest families
So your idea that democracy requires equality is completely ignoring the actual history of the word.
I wouldn't quite say "democracy requires equality". It's more accurate to say "inequality is corrosive". The amount of damage done depends on how much inequality and for how long and what countermeasures are taken (eg redistribution of wealth, expansions of rights, safety nets etc).
And I think if we look at history-sometimes excessive inequality is the downfall of a regime, yes; but then regimes also fall for lots of other reasons, and on other occasions inequality can endure seemingly-sustainably for centuries or even millennia.
And I don’t actually have any problem with democracy per se either - I just think some of the things you have been saying about the topic are overly simplistic.