The Commerce Department (
@CommerceGov) published DAO 216-26.
Overall this is a big step in the right direction. It fundamentally scraps the 2030 Census operational plan that was utilizing much of the same weaponized and failed 2020 census process by requiring a removal of differential privacy. Its wording also lays the groundwork for potentially republishing the 2020 census with accurate count data, which would be a very important additional development.
The
@CommerceGov department and
@howardlutnick deserve a lot of credit for this move.
However, the current language has a few contextual issues that could be exploited by malign actors in the future that would benefit from future clarity.
1. The document refers to the decennial census as a statistical product. Though the Census Bureau certainly has many statistical products, the decennial census is not one of them. The census is a count only, under the constitution, and attempts to treat it, illegally, as a statistical product in the past, is what led to the permissive nature in which the census was weaponized away from the functional purpose of the process. Additionally, any future admin that wants to sidestep the well intentioned bans on count manipulation could merely call the census a count as a means of attempting to get around said bans.
2. The document should have included clear legal language that it is illegal to statistically alter the count for any level of census geography and that privacy concerns can never override the constitutional and legal requirement for count accuracy. This can easily be clarified in the future.
3. The document uses the term “coarseness” which is census jargon and not an actual legal term. Judges will not be familiar with this term and its inclusion opens a door for future loopholes to be exploited by the woke and weaponized bureaucracy or a hostile admin. Characteristic data should be obscured but count accuracy should never be altered in any way by statistical methods.
But again, on the whole, this is a big step in the right direction and we applaud
@commerce @howardlutnick for leading in this direction.
commerce.gov/opog/disclosure…