Warren demands Trump officials explain removal of census interference ban

Senator ties policy change to broader ‘assault’ on federal statistics

Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, the top Democrat on the Senate Banking Committee, sent letters Wednesday to Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and other Trump administration officials demanding they explain why the Commerce Department removed language barring political interference from its scientific integrity policy. Warren cited NPR’s reporting on the change and raised concerns about its implications for the reliability of federal statistics on demographics and the economy.

The revised policy, with revisions dated Aug. 19, no longer states that “protection from inappropriate influence” is among the “hallmarks of scientific integrity.” The unannounced revisions, which NPR first reported, came a day after the Census Bureau released a report by a team with ties to the America First Policy Institute, a think tank founded by officials from President Trump’s first administration. NPR first reported on the team’s AFPI connections.

Data and election experts have criticized the AFPI-linked report’s claims about noncitizen voting as questionable and below the standards for research at the bureau. NPR’s earlier reporting described the document as highly unusual.

“Amid the Trump Administration’s broader assault on the integrity of the nation’s statistical system, in which you and the Department have played a key role, you owe the public a clear explanation of why the Department removed this language and how it arrived at this decision,” Warren wrote to Lutnick, who oversees the Census Bureau as the head of the Commerce Department.

Warren described the policy change as part of a wider pattern of Trump administration actions affecting federal statistics. In June, the administration banned a data privacy protection technique — differential privacy — that the Census Bureau had used for decades. The change forced the agency to delay the release of some survey results and raised the prospect that future public data on rural communities and other small populations could be cut.

This month, the administration proposed two unprecedented changes to the census itself. The first would, for the first time in U.S. history, exclude certain non-U.S. citizen residents from the count that determines each state’s share of congressional districts and Electoral College votes — a count the 14th Amendment says must include the “whole number of persons in each state.” The second would stop using the census to produce data on race and ethnicity.

Warren wrote that the proposals “would have sweeping implications for the quality of our economic data, the redistricting process that determines congressional representation, the Federal Reserve’s monetary policy decisions that rely upon key employment statistics and [Bureau of Economic Analysis] inflation data, and our ability to enforce civil rights and other laws.”

The senator is also probing whether the Commerce Department’s decision involved the Office of Management and Budget, the White House agency that coordinates federal statistical agencies, and is asking how the Federal Reserve is ensuring the accuracy of Census Bureau data it relies on. Her letter requests detailed answers by Oct. 7.

In a statement, Federal Reserve spokesperson Eric Kollig said the Fed plans to respond to Warren’s letter. Spokespeople for the Commerce Department and OMB did not immediately respond to NPR’s requests for comment.