Government Data: Report of the American Statistical Association

Imagine for a moment that you are the sort of American who would like to know facts about the the US economy, population, employment and unemployment, energy, crime and criminal justice, health, education, transportation, agriculture, science and engineering, income, consumption, wealth, foreign trade, and stuff like that. As I see it, have several options.

You can generalize wildly from personal experience. You can repeat assertions from your preferred social media. You assume that what your preferred politician tells you is correct. You can assume that what your preferred publications tell you is correct. You can assume that the information given to the public by business is correct.

Or, along with these tried-and-true methods, you can turn to government statistical agencies. They are imperfect, of course, as are all human organizations. But the methods they use to collected and to calculate statistics are publicly described, so that they can be questioned and more deeply understood. Also, they try to collect data in the same way over time, making changes only gradually and after public consideration, so that when a government statistic changes, you can understand why. Those who produce the statistics are paid salaries, so they are not selling you something, they not get paid for clicks, and they are not asking for your vote.

Yes, government statistical agencies are imperfect. But consider the alternatives! If you have an imperfect flashlight, it doesn’t mean you will see better in the dark; if you have imperfect data, it doesn’t mean that less data would be an improvement. At a bare minimum, having government statistics as a cross-check on those other oh-so-reliable sources of information seems valuable.

As I have noted some years ago, the arguments for the value of government statistics are old and well-known; indeed, they date back to the legislation involved in the first Census, back in 1790. Section 2 of the just-adopted US Constitution called for an enumeration of people to determine the number of members each state would have in the House of Representatives: But when the bill to enact the first Census came before Congress in 1790, James Madison (then a member of the House of Representatives) argued that there was a great opportunity here to do more than just counting heads, and that it would be useful to gather more information. Our records of Congressional debates from that time do not quote exactly verbatim, but instead are paraphrased. Here are some highlights of what Madison had to say when the topic of just-count-the-people or gather-more information was debated on January 25 and then on  February 2, 1790 (emphasis added):

This kind of information, he observed, all Legislatures had wished for; but this kind of information had never been obtained in any country. …If gentlemen have any doubts with respect to its utility, I cannot satisfy them in a better manner, than by referring them to the debates which took place upon the bills, intend, collaterally, to benefit the agricultural, commercial, and manufacturing parts of the community. Did they not wish then to know the relative proportion of each, and the exact number of every division, in order that they might rest their arguments on facts, instead of assertions and conjectures?

But the level of support for government statistics has been diminishing over time. The American Statistical Association had just published “Nation’s Data at Risk” (December 10, 2025). The report has a number of sensible recommendations for funding and independence of statistical agencies. Here, I just want to point out that budgets for the main statistical agencies have been declining over time in real dollars, and give a sense of what “government statistical agencies” actually means.

These figures show budgets for three main government statistical agencies since 2009: the Bureau of Labor Statistics (which does the surveys and calculations behind official unemployment and inflation rates), the National Agricultural Statistics Service, and the National Center for Health Statistics. Adjusted for inflation, their budgets are down about 14% since 2009.

For broader perspective, here are the 13 main federal statistical agencies. It’s worth emphasizing that the people running the statistical agencies do not make policy. They report the results of data collection.

Finally, I’ll add that US government spending in fiscal year 2025 is about $7 trillion. Add up all 13 of the federal statistical programs, and it’s under $4 billion in a typical year, going up to maybe $8 billion total in a year where the decennial Census is conducted. Thus, total government statistical spending is roughly one one-thousandth of federal spending. Paying for government data is considerably less expensive for the US economy than the costs of not having government data.

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