Administration orders for less detailed census data

The administration ordered a ban on methods that allow statistical agencies to publish detailed without sacrificing privacy. For NPR, Hansi Lo Wang reports:

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 decades to make certain data fuzzy — to ensure that individual people, including members of minority communities, can’t be identified.

Instead, the Trump administration’s new policy, which also applies to the Bureau of Economic Analysis, leaves both statistical agencies with two options going forward: releasing “coarsened” statistics with fewer details or not releasing some statistics at all.

So we get less detailed data or no data at all. That sounds like a lose-lose situation, especially for rural areas and towns with small population. It’s going to be more difficult for these areas to argue for resources when they’re classified as missing values in national datasets.