Assessing the Health of the Principal Federal Statistical Agencies

Publish an assessment of the health of the federal statistical agencies in the first quarter of 2024 with annual updates thereafter. See also our Frequently Asked Questions.

Statistics are a key foundation of our democratic society. They provide the government and public with necessary information to make important decisions such as the following, which span the breadth of society:

• Ensuring fair political representation and allocation of funds
• Developing effective public and private programs in agriculture, science, health, education, and criminal justice
• Conducting research to support policymaking
• Improving public understanding of social and economic trends

The federal agencies that produce statistical data, however, face a growing number of threats to their professional autonomy and objectivity. These threats endanger the statistical infrastructure on which modern society is built.

Several statistical agencies recently experienced threats to the integrity of key data sets (e.g., the 2020 Census) and their ability to carry out their basic functions (e.g., the abrupt relocation of US Department of Agriculture's Economic Research Service and subsequent loss of staff). Once threats have occurred, the federal agencies struggle to effectively address them, in part because such restorative work can be perceived as partisan if the threat was politically motivated.

In addition, statistical agencies face such challenges as stagnant budgets, declining survey response rates, growing demand for more timely and granular data, and the highly dynamic environment each agency must measure and track. The survey response challenge has become so great that a 2022 report of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine concluded, “U.S. statistical agencies’ reliance on sample-survey data and census data is unsustainable.”

Offsetting the threats are the promising opportunities possible through incorporating data from administrative records and non-federal sources, as well as newly available and powerful processing tools for data linkages. Federal statistical agencies need to be agile, innovative, and able to adopt new methods and technologies to keep up with rapid changes in the wider data ecosystem and the public’s evolving needs for relevant, timely information.

The statistical community maintains guidelines aimed at protecting federal statistics against many threats to objectivity and resources. These guidelines include the Statistical Policy Directives issued by the US Office of Management and Budget, National Academies' Principles and Practices for a Federal Statistical Agency, and United Nations' Fundamental Principles of Official Statistics. Yet there is no comprehensive effort to measure the extent these guidelines are met in practice and thus assess the health of the federal statistical system.

Our goal is to monitor the health of the federal statistical agencies with a set of simple and transparent indicators, or “vital signs.” Candidate indicators include measures of the following:

• Resources (e.g., budget levels, staffing, contracting, unfunded mandates)
• Professional autonomy (view preliminary work on this topic)
• Innovation/modernization capabilities (e.g., new products, pilot projects, staff exchanges with other agencies and academia, timeliness of data releases)
• Workforce (e.g., employee satisfaction, professional development, recruitment and retention, diversity)
• Host agency support for statistical agency (e.g., layers between statistical and host agency heads, initiatives in president’s budget request)
• Data use and user engagement (e.g., transparency, dedicated advisory committee, customer satisfaction, data access modes, and timeliness and usability of data products)

Our assessment will rely on publicly available information, supplemented by information provided by the statistical agencies through structured inquiries. We will identify data sources, consult widely with the agencies and others about suitable metrics, develop a first suite of metrics and review them in a public workshop in fall 2023, and publish the first annual report on the health of federal statistics in early 2024. We hope these reports will raise awareness of the value of federal statistics and the need for a strong federal statistical system.

• Statistical Policy Directive No. 1: Fundamental Responsibilities of Federal Statistical Agencies and Recognized Statistical Units
• Foundations for Evidence-Based Policymaking Act of 2018 (“The Evidence Act”)
• What Protects the Autonomy of the Federal Statistical Agencies? An Assessment of the Procedures in Place That Protect the Independence and Objectivity of Official Statistics. Statistics and Public Policy (2023, in print)
• Principles and Practices for a Federal Statistical Agency (7th Edition)
• Our Nation’s Data Infrastructure Needs Attention and Investment, CountOnStats
• What the experts say on the state of our data infrastructure
• Safeguarding Facts in an Era of Disinformation: The Case for Independently Monitoring the U.S. Statistical System, Jonathan Auerbach, Harvard Data Science Review, July 2023
• June 2023 webinar to the Association of Public Data Users by Auerbach, Citro, and Pierson

On November 6, 2023 on the Arlington campus of George Mason University, we hosted a workshop, Assessing the Health of the Federal Statistical Agencies, to lay the foundation for the criteria to be used, the collection of information to inform the evaluation of the criteria, and the methods to be used to generate an objective assessment of the health of the federal statistical agencies. View the workshop agenda.