A Trump push to cut 'statistical noise' could mean less data from the Census Bureau

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. Anton Petrus/Getty Images hide caption

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 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.

Data experts worry it could be the latter at the Census Bureau.

"Neighborhood-level data is at risk. Rural communities' data may be not publishable," says Beth Jarosz, a senior fellow at Georgetown University's Massive Data Institute and vice president of the Association of Public Data Users. "There are some counties that are only a couple hundred people, and you might not be able to publish data for those counties anymore."