Commerce Department removes political interference language from scientific integrity policy

Revision dates to day after bureau issued noncitizen voting report

The Commerce Department quietly cut language banning political interference from its scientific integrity policy in an unannounced revision dated Aug. 19, NPR reported Monday. The change applies to all agencies under the department, including the Census Bureau, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Bureau of Economic Analysis, which is known for tracking the country’s gross domestic product.

The removal came one day after the Census Bureau issued a report that NPR described as “highly unusual” with claims about noncitizen voting. NPR previously reported that the team behind that report has ties to a think tank founded by officials from President Trump’s first administration. Spokespeople for the Commerce Department and the Census Bureau did not respond to NPR’s requests for comment on the policy revision.

The 2025 version of the scientific integrity policy, updated days before Trump’s second inauguration, included bans on attempts to shape or interfere in data collection, statistical analysis and other scientific activities “against well-accepted scientific methods and theories or without scientific justification,” according to NPR. That language is absent in the revised policy.

The 2025 version also said the department’s policy involved ensuring scientific findings “are not suppressed, delayed, or altered for political purposes and are not subjected to inappropriate influence” and required “independent review of facilities, methodologies, and other scientific activities as appropriate to ensure scientific integrity.” The revision removes those provisions.

The revised policy retains a definition of “scientific integrity” similar to the previous version, but no longer lists “protection from inappropriate influence” among the “hallmarks of scientific integrity,” NPR found.

Nancy Potok, a former deputy director at the Census Bureau who has also served at the Commerce Department, called the change “a major change that eliminates the guardrails against political interference in the statistical and scientific data products of the department.”

Potok has tracked how statistical agencies have responded to a years-long, bipartisan effort to safeguard trustworthy federal information. That effort produced a 2018 law that led to a rule known among federal data experts as the “Trust Regulation,” which requires statistical agencies to “determine the policies and practices that ensure objectivity of its statistical activities” and produce data that is “impartial and free from undue influence and the appearance of undue influence.”

“The fact that there is a conscious effort to revise the department administrative orders and not incorporate things that are in the [Trust Regulation], instead of going in the other direction, is definitely troubling and needs some explanation,” Potok said.

For Robert Santos, a former Census Bureau director nominated under President Biden, the close timing of the policy revision and the bureau’s release of the noncitizen voting report is striking.

“It’s entirely possible that this was done to reconcile the Department of Commerce and the administration’s own actions by publishing an external partisan document about voting on the Census Bureau website,” Santos said. “The publishing exemplifies inappropriate influence. It was not transparent, and it didn’t even include career staff experts.”

The revised policy sets up a new system for investigating alleged violations with a reduced role for the department’s lawyers, a change that troubles Beth Jarosz, vice president of the Association of Public Data Users.

“There’s room for interference because the way that the new rule is structured leaves lots of opportunities to put pressure on staff to act in a certain way, to decide things in a certain way or to come to certain conclusions,” Jarosz said. “It certainly seems like the guardrails, if they are still there at all, they are much weaker than they used to be.”

The policy revision comes amid other moves by the Trump administration that have alarmed longtime observers of the Census Bureau. In June, the administration banned the bureau from using a data privacy protection technique the agency had used for decades, delaying the release of new estimates from the American Community Survey and potentially reducing the amount of statistics the bureau can release about local areas and small populations, including rural communities. The administration has signaled that proposals for major changes to the 2030 census may be on their way.

The change arrives as the bureau navigates a brain drain of statisticians, economists and other expert civil servants that current and former employees have attributed to the administration’s cuts to the federal workforce.

The Aug. 19 revision date falls one day after the Census Bureau released the unauthored report on noncitizen voting that MSI previously reported had ties to a Trump-aligned think tank, and days before President Trump cited that report to renew claims about the 2020 election.