Assessing the Health of the Federal Statistical Agencies—the Year 2 Report

In summer 2025, the joint ASA-George Mason University project to assess the health of the principal federal statistical agencies, will release its second annual report. The report will build and expand on the findings in the inaugural report, "The Nation's Data at Risk: Meeting America's Information Needs for the 21st Century," which focused on the 13 federal statistical agencies. It will cover additional topics, including the operation of the US decentralized statistical system, the role of the statistical units and statistical officials, and the perspectives of data users, parent agencies, and the international official-statistics community. In this session we will review the reactions to and the impact of the inaugural report, the year-2 report findings, and our plans for the third annual report. We will also request and encourage audience input. Funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the project's goal is to proactively assess the health of the federal statistical agencies, especially whether they have the resources and professional autonomy to fulfill their missions effectively, efficiently, and objectively. This assessment will address a wide range of issues at a particularly critical time-when survey response rates are falling, the expanded role for the statistical agencies in the 2018 Evidence Act is a work in progress, and barriers impede the ability of the statistical agencies to obtain needed data from other statistical and nonstatistical agencies and state governments in a timely and cost-effective way. Given the challenging landscape, this project's assessment is especially important to ensure that objective, relevant, accurate, credible, and timely government statistics continue into the future.