Falling public participation in surveys and trust in government have plagued the U.S. Census Bureau for decades.
And some of the agency's current and former workers say there's a new complication to gathering enough survey responses to produce key statistics for the country.
The Trump administration's murky handling of data, which has sparked investigations and lawsuits alleging privacy violations, has become one of the reasons people cite when declining to share their information for the federal government's ongoing surveys, these workers say.
"I got more people asking me how I know information isn't going to be sold or given away," says a former field representative, who says they were met with "a lot of suspicion" and specific mentions of Elon Musk, President Trump's billionaire adviser who set up the DOGE team, from some households they tried to interview earlier this year. The former bureau employee, who was let go as part of the Trump administration's downsizing of the federal government, asked not to be named because they fear retaliation.
A current field representative says they don't "feel as comfortable" in their role as they felt asking questions for surveys last year — and neither do some people who had previously shared their information. One person specifically mentioned DOGE when declining a follow-up interview, says the current representative, who asked NPR not to name them because they are not authorized to speak publicly.
"It's a system that runs on trust, and the trust, I would say, has been declining," the current field representative says. "It makes me sad as an American that distrust is at that level. But I do understand it. I fear for the data I'm collecting. Is it going to be misused? And the privacy guarantees that I describe to people — are those going to be respected?"
These questions don't surprise Nancy Bates, a former senior researcher for survey methodology at the bureau. Bates has tracked declining public participation in the census going back to the 1990 tally.
Federal law prohibits the bureau from releasing information that would identify a person or business to anyone, including other federal agencies and law enforcement. But a report Bates helped prepare during the first Trump administration found 28% of people surveyed in 2018 said they were very or extremely concerned the bureau would not keep their 2020 census answers confidential.
"Even prior to DOGE, the Census Bureau was always dealing with a level of mistrust about privacy and confidentiality," says Bates, who, after retiring from the agency in 2020, helped lead its 2030 census advisory committee before the Trump administration disbanded it. "I absolutely can see why the public concern would be increased following these unauthorized and illegal access to data."
In several legal fights, plaintiffs have claimed Trump officials violated data privacy protections and did not provide clarity on who has accessed data, and for what purposes. Critics of the administration's efforts are concerned about increased risks of government data systems getting hacked and unauthorized releases of people's personal information, including medical and financial records, that could result in identity theft and other harm.
And while the bureau has not been implicated in the cases, public perception of the agency may still take a hit.
"The public doesn't do a great job of differentiating between federal agencies, so they may think that if DOGE is getting access to Social Security, IRS, Treasury, then they're probably getting access to the Census Bureau data as well," Bates says.
And that, Bates fears, could hurt the bureau's ability to produce accurate statistics.
White House spokesperson Kush Desai said in an email that "a small group of people refusing to engage with Census field representatives is not a new development" and that extrapolating "some widespread distrust of the Census because of DOGE is a hard stretch."
In a separate statement, the bureau's acting director, Ron Jarmin, said: "The Census Bureau is committed to providing accurate and timely data about the nation's people and economy. New technology and data science are helping us modernize our data collection methods and efficiently produce high quality statistics."
Still, experts outside the bureau warn that public concern about the Trump administration's push to access and compile existing government data could have long-term consequences on the future data needed to redistribute political representation, monitor the health of the U.S. economy, allocate federal funding for public services and better understand the needs of the country's people.
How distrust in the government could lead to skewed statistics
About a quarter of the people the bureau surveyed in 2018 said they were very or extremely concerned that their 2020 census answers would be shared with other government agencies or used against them — and the level of concern was higher among people of color than white people who did not identify as Hispanic.
It's a kind of divide that could lead to a statistical phenomenon known as nonresponse bias. Trivellore Raghunathan, a statistician at the University of Michigan, says he fears it will emerge in more federal surveys if certain populations perceive the U.S. government is collecting data to go after them as part of immigration enforcement, for example, rather than to produce statistics.
"It is quite possible that the distrust in the government could be more prevalent in one particular community that decides that, 'Well, we don't want to participate in the survey,' " explains Raghunathan, who has worked with the bureau's researchers on how to address declining responses rates for the Current Population Survey that produces the monthly jobs report. "The whole goal of the survey is to make sure that the data is representing the population for which we are drawing inference about. And any kind of a skewness in participation will destroy that representativeness."
Federal statistical agencies have long had trouble fully reflecting Black, Indigenous, Latino and Asian people in the data they release. The census, for decades, has undercounted people of color while overcounting white people who did not identify as Hispanic, and the monthly jobs report has limited breakdowns by race and geography because of insufficient survey sample sizes.
"I would expect the problems that we already have with collecting information from marginalized communities would get worse if fears about the government having access to anything that people tell a statistical agency get worse," says Katharine Abraham, an economist at the University of Maryland, who led the Bureau of Labor Statistics during the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations.
How DOGE's amassing of data could hurt a solution to declining survey responses
One of the main strategies for addressing declining participation in surveys is using existing government records to try to fill in the blanks in a person's demographic profile.
It requires a pooling of data from other government agencies that may sound similar to DOGE's data-amassing efforts. But Abraham points out the Trump administration has not laid out "clearly specified purposes that Congress has authorized" or "clear protocols for how that information is going to be protected from unauthorized uses."
In explaining the decision to temporarily block the Social Security Administration from giving the DOGE team access to people's personally identifiable information, U.S. District Judge Ellen Lipton Hollander noted the Trump administration has "not provided the Court with a reasonable explanation for why the entire DOGE Team needs full access to the wide swath of data maintained in SSA systems" in order to identify fraudulent or improper payments.
"The purpose in the DOGE world seems to be very much to go after individuals," Abraham says. "Whereas if you're talking about the statistical agencies, that's not the purpose at all. The purpose is to use the data to provide information that can guide policy."
Abraham chaired the Commission on Evidence-Based Policymaking that, at the bipartisan request of Congress and former President Barack Obama, considered whether the country needed a data "clearinghouse" that would permanently store confidential survey data and other records from multiple agency databases in order to help government officials and certain outside researchers evaluate federal programs and inform policymaking.
The commission rejected that idea out of fear that it "would create an attractive target for misuse of private data." Instead, it called for the creation of a "National Secure Data Service" that "brings together as little data as possible for as little time as possible for exclusively statistical purposes."
For Abraham, DOGE's push to pool government data brings to mind a controversial 1965 recommendation by social scientists. That proposal to build a national data center drew pushback from lawmakers concerned about privacy protections. At a 1966 congressional hearing, Vance Packard, an author who wrote about privacy threats, testified: "My own hunch is that Big Brother, if he ever comes to these United States, may turn out to be not a greedy power seeker, but rather a relentless bureaucrat obsessed with efficiency."
"We've been down this path before," Abraham explains. "[The 1965 proposal] raised so much alarm that it led to the passage of the Privacy Act." That 1974 law is cited in many of the lawsuits against the Trump administration's data push.
Abraham says she's concerned that DOGE's efforts will lead to a similar backlash and changes in law that overly restrict how government records can be used.
"That could become a barrier to [the statistical agencies] being able to use the data, which I think would be unfortunate," she says. "Using administrative data instead of collecting survey data reduces the burden that the statistical agencies put on people, and, in a lot of cases, it leads to more accurate information."
Barry Johnson, a former chief data analytics officer at the IRS, also fears that advances in the statistical use of government records will stall.
As a member of the Advisory Committee on Data for Evidence Building — which was established through a law Trump signed in 2019 — Johnson supported the earlier commission's proposal for a national data service with explicit restrictions on any direct use for enforcing laws or determining a person's eligibility for government benefits.
"What's going on now will make it harder to make a credible argument that data are being used in a way that protects privacy and is really just for statistical purposes, to try to improve the way government functions," Johnson says.
Jeff Hardcastle, a former demographer for the state of Nevada, says some state officials who manage their governments' records are wary of how the Trump administration is handling federal data. That could complicate any new efforts by the bureau to request access to state records for completing the 2030 census.
"You're going to have some states be reluctant to participate. And then you're going to have others that are very eager to participate," Hardcastle says, adding that could contribute to "inequality across the country for the census count, which will be problematic in terms of redistricting and the impact on any funding formulas that are [based on population size]."
For Bates, the survey methodologist who retired from the Census Bureau, it all means her former colleagues who are still at the agency will likely have their work cut out for them as they continue preparing for the 2030 census — including next year's major field test — while carrying out ongoing surveys.
"This is kind of like a tsunami, if you will, of pushing the public to have higher mistrust levels," Bates says. "I think it's going to take years, to be honest, to get back to where we were."
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Edited by Benjamin Swasey
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