Last week, the Independent Census Scientific Advisory Committee (I-CSAC) held its fall meeting and came out with 20 recommendations to the Census Bureau. I-CSAC is an independent, nonpartisan group of scientists who review decisions that shape the quality and usability of U.S. population data. This meeting covered two major issues that are worth knowing about, especially if you use Census data for your work.
#1 Who gets counted, and how
The Commerce Department has proposed asking about citizenship or legal status on the 2030 Census — specifically, to count only citizens and green-card holders. I-CSAC recommends against this, pointing to the Bureau’s own research showing it would hurt response rates and, in turn, data quality.
There’s also a proposal to stop collecting race and ethnicity data. I-CSAC strongly opposes this too. The Bureau has collected race data since 1790 and ethnicity data since 1980. This information underpins population estimates, anti-discrimination enforcement, and funding formulas, and can’t simply be replaced with administrative records. Instead, I-CSAC recommends the Bureau follow the 2024 federal standards (OMB Statistical Policy Directive 15) for how race/ethnicity data is collected.
#2 How privacy is protected in the data
Since 1990, the Bureau has used noise-infusion/differential privacy methods to protect individuals’ identities in published data. A new Commerce Department order would ban this method and restrict privacy protection to only “coarsening” and “suppression.”
I-CSAC’s scientists say this shift isn’t backed by the evidence and would significantly reduce how useful Census data is — with outsized impact on Tribal Nations, small localities, and redistricting. Small, rural populations face higher disclosure risk, potentially making usable data impossible to produce under the new rules. I-CSAC is asking the Bureau to keep innovating on privacy protection rather than reverting to older methods, and to study the added costs/data-quality tradeoffs. They also urge transparency: to publish suppression/coarsening plans early, release several rounds of demonstration data products (as before 2020), and proactively engage local/state demographers, small-locality stakeholders, and redistricting data users.
The bottom line: I-CSAC’s 20 recommendations push back on both proposed changes — favoring continued, sophisticated privacy protection and continued collection of race/ethnicity data, while opposing new citizenship/legal-status questions.
Want the full picture? See I-CSAC’s complete set of 20 recommendations. And if you would like a refresher on how Census data works and why it matters, see NCoC’s Census primer.
