The Commerce Department, which oversees the Census Bureau and the Bureau of Economic Analysis, quietly removed language that barred political interference from its scientific integrity policy, raising alarms among former agency officials and data experts.
The revision — dated Aug. 19 — came a day after the Census Bureau posted an unusual, unauthored report about non-U.S. citizen voting that NPR previously reported was produced by a team with ties to a think tank founded by officials from President Trump’s first administration. The change affects every agency under Commerce, including the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which provides weather data, and the Bureau of Economic Analysis, which compiles gross domestic product statistics.
A January 2025 version of the department’s scientific integrity policy had explicitly prohibited attempts to shape or interfere with data collection, statistical analysis and other scientific activities “against well-accepted scientific methods and theories or without scientific justification.” It also said agencies must ensure findings “are not suppressed, delayed, or altered for political purposes and are not subjected to inappropriate influence,” and that independent review should be used as appropriate to protect integrity.
Those specific protections against inappropriate influence no longer appear in the Trump administration’s revision, according to an analysis of the policy text posted by Commerce. While the new version keeps a definition of “scientific integrity” similar to the prior edition, it drops language that listed protection from inappropriate influence among the hallmarks of scientific integrity.
Commerce and Census spokespersons did not respond to requests for comment.
Former Census officials and statistical experts say the removal of that language is troubling because it eliminates a formal “guardrail” against political pressure. Nancy Potok, a former deputy director of the Census Bureau who has also served at Commerce, described the change as “a major change that eliminates the guardrails against political interference in the statistical and scientific data products of the department.”
Potok noted that this shift runs counter to a years-long effort — including a 2018 law and a later federal rule known among data experts as the Trust Regulation — aimed at ensuring federal statistical work is objective, impartial and free from undue influence. She said the department’s choice to revise its administrative orders without incorporating those Trust Regulation standards is “definitely troubling and needs some explanation.”
Robert Santos, a former Census director and Biden nominee, pointed to the close timing of the policy revision and the bureau’s posting of the unauthored report as striking. He argued the publication of that partisan external document on the bureau website “exemplifies inappropriate influence,” saying it was neither transparent nor produced with the involvement of career staff experts.
The policy change comes amid other actions by the Trump administration that have raised concerns about the bureau’s independence and capacity. In June, the administration prohibited the Census Bureau from using a long-standing data privacy method known as differential privacy. That decision delayed the release of new American Community Survey estimates and could reduce the amount of reliable local-level statistics the bureau can publish, affecting information about small populations and rural areas.
The administration has also signaled possible major changes to the 2030 census, including proposals tied to citizenship questions and revisions to race and ethnicity categories. Observers worry those shifts, combined with cuts to the federal workforce that produced a significant loss of experienced statisticians, economists and career civil servants, leave the bureau particularly vulnerable as it prepares for the next decennial count. The 2030 census will be used to redistribute political representation and federal funding for the following decade.
The revised scientific integrity policy also alters how alleged violations would be investigated, reducing the role for the department’s lawyers in that process. Beth Jarosz, vice president of the Association of Public Data Users, said the new structure “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.” She added that, if any guardrails remain, “they are much weaker than they used to be.”
For many data experts and former Census staff, the combination of policy changes, staffing losses and operational shifts signals an alarming trend: steps that could enable political influence over one of the nation’s most important statistical agencies at a critical moment ahead of the 2030 head count.