THE HALFAX HEIMDALL AUGUR

A Trump push to cut 'statistical noise' could mean less data from the Census Bureau New public data for redistricting and other uses may be reduced as Trump officials limit the ways the Census Bureau can protect people's privacy when it releases statistics.

The Republican Plan to Reform the Census Could Put Everyone's ... - WIRED Save Story Save this story Save Story Save this story President Donald Trump and the Republican Party have spent the better part of the president’s second term radically reshaping the federal government. But in recent weeks, the GOP has set its sights on taking another run at an old target: the US census. Since the first Trump administration, the right has sought to add a question to the census that captures a respondent’s immigration status and to exclude noncitizens from the tallies that determine how seats in Congress are distributed. In 2019, the Supreme Court struck down an attempt by the first Trump administration to add a citizenship question to the census. But now, a little-known algorithmic process called “ differential privacy ,” created to keep census data from being used to identify individual respondents, has become the right’s latest focus. WIRED spoke to six experts about the GOP’s ongoing effort to falsely allege that a system created to protect people’s privacy has made the data from the 2020 census inaccurate. If successful, the campaign to get rid of differential privacy could not only rad…

The Trump Administration’s New Census Data Rules Are a Policy Disaster The new policy, which forbids "noise infusion" as a technique for anonymizing data, will "handcuff" the Census Bureau and limit what information becomes public, data experts say.

www.wshu.org NPR News A Trump push to cut 'statistical noise' could mean less data from the Census Bureau NPR | By Hansi Lo Wang Published June 12, 2026 at 6:01 PM EDT Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Anton Petrus / Getty Images A new Trump administration order bans the Census Bureau and the Bureau of Economic Analysis from using statistical "noise," or data for fuzzing survey results, to protect people's privacy in their statistics. A wonky policy change by the Trump administration may spell the end of a wide swath of data from the Census Bureau, including key statistics used for redistricting, policymaking and research. Federal law requires the bureau to keep people anonymous in the data it produces from surveys and government records. But this month, the administration put out an order that many data experts say makes it harder, if not impossible, for the agency to balance protecting the confidentiality of people's information with releasing useful data about local areas and small populations. The order by the Commerce Department, which oversees the bureau, bans "noise infusion." It's one of the main privacy protection techniques the bureau has used for deca…

The Trump Administration's New Census Data Rules Are a Policy Disaster Behind closed doors and without expert input, the Trump administration issued a major policy change to how census data is released. Data experts are concerned the result will be less reliable public data related to redistricting, natural disasters, the workforce, housing, and more. On June 4, the Trump administration released an order, Disclosure Avoidance for Statistical Products , that forbids “any use of noise infusion” for statistical products. “Coarsening shall be the preferred category of Disclosure Avoidance methods for all statistical products,” the order states. “Suppression shall be permitted as a last resort, only to be used when coarsening is prohibited by law or would substantially defeat the accuracy or usability of a statistical product.” In statistical terms, noise infusion is a common and accepted technique for privacy protection when working with data: it creates “fuzz” or random values within a dataset, making the published statistics slightly different from the actual, sensitive data. Coarsening is the process of grouping and rounding data, or reporting it in ranges instead of potentially id…

A Trump push to cut 'statistical noise' could mean less data from the ... NPR News A Trump push to cut 'statistical noise' could mean less data from the Census Bureau NPR | By Hansi Lo Wang Published June 12, 2026 at 4:01 PM MDT Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Anton Petrus / Getty Images A new Trump administration order bans the Census Bureau and the Bureau of Economic Analysis from using statistical "noise," or data for fuzzing survey results, to protect people's privacy in their statistics. A wonky policy change by the Trump administration may spell the end of a wide swath of data from the Census Bureau, including key statistics used for redistricting, policymaking and research. Federal law requires the bureau to keep people anonymous in the data it produces from surveys and government records. But this month, the administration put out an order that many data experts say makes it harder, if not impossible, for the agency to balance protecting the confidentiality of people's information with releasing useful data about local areas and small populations. The order by the Commerce Department, which oversees the bureau, bans "noise infusion." It's one of the ma…