“Protection from inappropriate influence is a hallmark of scientific integrity” . . . not any more!

This is a funny one. Remember how Google used to have the slogan, “Don’t be evil,” but then they abandoned it? Something similar seems to have happened with the U.S. Census Bureau.

Dale Lehman pointed me to the story:

I’m sure . But I don’t think the usual lag is appropriate given the seriousness of this.

From the linked item, by economist Justin Wolfers:

“Protection from inappropriate influence is a hallmark of scientific integrity.” That line governed the Census Bureau and then the White House quietly disappeared it. . . . Three weeks ago, I would have told you that the American government couldn’t suppress economic data like this. But under the new rules that the administration just put forward, the White House can direct its political operatives to kill uncomfortable numbers. . . . Three weeks ago the United States had a policy that protected the free flow of scientific information and barred political meddling in how Census Bureau findings are presented. Today, it doesn’t. To be clear: I’m not (yet) saying that our government is cooking the statistical books. Instead, I’m saying that it took the necessary steps to make that legal, and possible. In recent weeks, the Trump administration quietly rewrote the rules that kept political interference out of our economic statistics. And almost nobody noticed.

I didn’t notice either! Contra Lehman’s assumption, this was news to me. I guess that’s how news spreads now: Wolfers posts this on his blog, Lehman sees it and emails the link to me, I post it here and you see it, etc. Sometimes Tyler Cowen or Alex Tabarrok notices items from this blog and they post it on Marginal Revolution. Or maybe Krugman will post on it. The New York Times or Wall Street Journal might cover it too.

What I kind of wonder is how Wolfers heard about it. He’s a user of public data, so it makes sense that he’d be directly interested in the topic. But how did he find out about this obscure announcement? Was he just rooting through the census website one day and noticed something different? Did he see this on some news site? Was it sent to him by an anonymous tipster (I get lots of that sort of email!)? I’m curious. Wolfers does point to this NPR report from last month, so my guess is that someone noticed it and pointed Wolfers to it.

From the NPR article:

The Commerce Department updated its policy for promoting a “culture of scientific integrity” in January 2025, days before Trump’s second inauguration. 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. The 2025 version included bans on attempts to shape or interfere in data collection, statistical analysis and other scientific activities “against well-accepted scientific methods and theories or without scientific justification.” The department’s policy, the 2025 version said, involves ensuring scientific findings at its agencies “are not suppressed, delayed, or altered for political purposes and are not subjected to inappropriate influence,” as well as making sure there’s “independent review of facilities, methodologies, and other scientific activities as appropriate to ensure scientific integrity.” That language is missing, however, in the Trump administration’s revision of the policy, according to an NPR analysis of text posted on the Commerce Department’s website. And while the revision adopts a definition for “scientific integrity” that is similar to the previous version, it no longer says that “protection from inappropriate influence” is among the “hallmarks of scientific integrity.” Spokespeople for the Commerce Department and Census Bureau did not respond to NPR’s requests for comment.

I guess the strategy of dodging comments worked, at least for awhile, because for three weeks nobody else seemed to have picked up on this story.

NPR continues:

While most of the public may not be familiar with the policy, Nancy Potok, a former deputy director at the bureau who has also served at the Commerce Department, sees the removed language as “a major change that eliminates the guardrails against political interference in the statistical and scientific data products of the department.” Potok has been tracking how statistical agencies have been responding to a years-long, bipartisan effort to make sure the federal government produces trustworthy information. That included a 2018 law that led to a rule known among federal data experts as the “Trust Regulation.” The rule requires that statistical agencies “determine the policies and practices that ensure objectivity of its statistical activities” and produce data that is “impartial and free from undue influence and the appearance of undue influence.” “The fact that there is a conscious effort to revise the department administrative orders and not incorporate things that are in the [Trust Regulation], instead of going in the other direction, is definitely troubling and needs some explanation,” Potok adds.

Why did the government do this?

For former Census Bureau Director Robert Santos, a Biden nominee, the close timing of the policy revision and the bureau’s release of an unauthored report with claims about noncitizen voting is striking. “It’s entirely possible that this was done to reconcile the Department of Commerce and the administration’s own actions by publishing an external partisan document about voting on the Census Bureau website,” Santos says.

And Wolfers brings on the indignation:

On August 19, the Commerce Department posted a new directive called “Scientific Integrity” — note the scare quotes. . . . They posted this directive very quietly. There was no press release, no announcement, and no press conference. For the first time in his life, Howard Lutnick was quiet. The new version just appeared online. To analyze the changes, I [Wolfers] actually had to go to the Wayback Machine to find the prior version of this policy, because it had been wiped from the Commerce website. There’s something pretty bleak about a country’s rules about scientific integrity surviving only because a volunteer internet archive grabbed a copy.

The Jan 2025 rules are here, and the new rules are here.

What do I think about all this? I’m not sure.

On one hand, the above story sounds horrible, and I think it’s disgraceful how government officials have been throwing around slogans such as “gold standard science” while suppressing reports, promoting discredited or flat-out fake science, and adding corruption to the science funding process, while their friends in the media are resorting to ridiculous defenses of indefensible policies.

On the other hand, this updated document could just be some overly busy bureaucrats trying some stupid idea. Also, if that 2025 policy was such a good idea, why did they wait until 2025 to institute it?

If “Protection from inappropriate influence is a hallmark of scientific integrity” is such an important slogan, where was it in the Census Bureau’s first 235 years? There must be more to this story.

On the whole, though, I guess I’d go with Noem’s Razor here: Never attribute to stupidity that which is adequately explained by malice.

In short: I think it’s reasonable to assume that this new document was motivated by some inappropriate reason, such as a desire to steal or to cover up some past or anticipated future offense, or from a general ideological position opposing objective knowledge and open scientific inquiry, or from a political attitude that independent science should be weakened because it represent a source of power that’s not under control of the government or its allies. Also, though, I guess they’re stupid. Just like the Soviets under Lysenko, an analogy that keeps coming to mind.

There’s an alternative explanation that this is all just a bunch of paperwork jockeys trying to justify their own existence, but Noem’s Razor suggests otherwise.