As federal agencies brace for the Trump administration's next round of slashing the U.S. government, recent staff departures are already raising concerns about whether the Census Bureau can continue producing reliable statistics for the country.
Like most other agencies, the bureau is under pressure from Trump officials to further shrink their workforce while keeping in place a hiring freeze. According to emails shared with NPR, agency staffers are facing a Thursday deadline for applications for early retirement and voluntary separation offers that may be followed by mass firings.
But current and former employees warn that the bureau — which for years has been dealing with the restrictions of short-term funding and staffing challenges — is under unique strain.
The federal government's largest statistical agency is well into preparations for the 2030 national head count of U.S. residents, which is set to be used to determine how federal funding is allocated to local communities and how presidents, members of Congress and other levels of government are elected. The bureau also carries out the surveys that produce the monthly jobs report and other key data sets.
Outside the bureau, census advocates are concerned that reports of the DOGE team of Elon Musk, President Trump's billionaire adviser, accessing sensitive data at other federal agencies, as well as a new agreement that gives immigration authorities access to tax information about some immigrants without legal status, could discourage more households from sharing their personal information for the bureau's surveys.
"I think the public needs to question whether the agency is going to be able to produce the information that it needs to on time with the same quality that we've grown accustomed to," says Amy O'Hara, a former bureau official who is now the executive director of the Federal Statistical Research Data Center at Georgetown University.
How Census Bureau staff departures could hurt U.S. statistics
Since the start of the second Trump administration, at least five division or office chiefs — including two who were part of 2030 census preparations — have left the bureau, which lists 43 chief positions on its public staff roster.
Other executive-level turnover among career civil servants is creating vacancies on the bureau's Data Stewardship Executive Policy Committee, a key internal decision-making body focused on protecting the confidentiality of the information collected from survey participants.
Those committee vacancies are "going to be to everyone's detriment in terms of the functioning of the agency and just getting work done," O'Hara says.
Recent departures at lower ranks of the bureau are even more troubling, O'Hara adds, because "if you have all of these different layers out the door, you're going to have a great decrease in productivity, which is, I guess, the opposite of what this [downsizing by the Trump administration] is intended to do."
The bureau's public information office has not responded to NPR's requests for comment.
According to emails shared with NPR, the early retirement and voluntary separation offers are supposed to "avoid or lessen" the impact of mass layoffs. Current employees are also grappling with the Trump administration attempting to end the bureau's telework and remote-work agreements for unionized workers, according to other emails obtained by NPR.
These moves by Trump officials come as the bureau continues to face long-standing staffing challenges at its regional offices around the country. A report last month by the agency's internal watchdog, the Commerce Department inspector general's office, found the bureau has not been recruiting and retaining enough interviewers in recent years for three key surveys, including the Current Population Survey that produces the monthly job report, and lacks a plan for building up a field representative staff.
"It's a challenge being efficient because it feels like we're spending time in our meetings just discussing, 'What can we do to keep things afloat?' " says a current employee at the bureau who NPR has agreed not to name because they fear retaliation at work. "That's valuable time that could be spent on doing the real work that supports America's data."
Many employees fear the ongoing brain drain at the bureau would be hard to reverse even if Trump lifts the hiring freeze and allows the bureau to find permanent replacements for departed staffers.
"Expertise doesn't grow on trees," the bureau employee says. "These people who have been here for a long time understand nuances. They know how to assess risks. They know how to address problems before they happen."
It's also not clear if all of the vacancies would be filled with career civil servants as the administration continues pushing to reclassify positions so that it can put in place more political appointees.
Amid staffing disruptions, the bureau has been making unexpected changes to its ongoing surveys and 2030 census planning.
This week, less than two months after asking for public comment on its plans, the bureau announced the cancellation of a 2026 survey that classifies local governments after it said it determined there are "reliable" alternative ways of getting that information.
With no public explanation, the bureau also delayed the March data collection for the Household Trends and Outlook Pulse Survey until May and postponed May's collection until a to-be-determined date. And the agency has postponed the planned release dates for 17 reports on 2020 census operational assessments, evaluations and experiments that are supposed to inform preparations for the 2030 count.
How other agencies' data-sharing for law enforcement could dampen public trust in the bureau
While not directly related to the bureau's work, the Internal Revenue Service's data-sharing agreement with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, as well as reports of DOGE team members accessing sensitive data at other federal agencies, could have long-term implications for the 2030 count, some census advocates warn.
Under federal law, the bureau cannot use census responses "for any purpose other than the statistical purposes for which it is supplied."
But Jae June Lee, a fellow focused on census data quality at the National Conference on Citizenship, a civic engagement organization, says the bureau "doesn't operate in a vacuum" and its survey work is taking place in a climate of mistrust in how the federal government handles data.
"It's going to be hard to ask people to disaggregate agencies in their mind. They're going to perceive the government as a whole," Lee says.
With participation in surveys long on the decline, the bureau's researchers have been working on ways to rely more on existing administrative records from government programs to help fill in gaps of information. But Lee says they may not ultimately help the bureau overcome growing reluctance in interacting with the U.S. government, especially among immigrants, people of color and other historically undercounted groups.
"The basic idea is that if surveys fail, we can fall back on the data that people already give us. But I think that overlooks something really basic," Lee adds. "People participate in those public programs and services as well, and if people no longer trust those programs and services — whether it's the tax system, Medicaid or Medicare — they're not going to participate in those programs or they're going to provide less accurate information."
As for the information the bureau already has on hand, a recent contract cut has added another complication.
According to emails shared with NPR, the online training systems the bureau has relied on for its mandatory data stewardship training are set to no longer be available to the agency.
Have information you want to share about changes at the Census Bureau or across the federal government? Hansi Lo Wang is available via the encrypted messaging app Signal (hansi.01).
Edited by Benjamin Swasey
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