The Insights Association’s opposition to changes to the 2026 census test came in a letter signed by the organisation and led by the Population Association of America, and which was addressed to US commerce secretary Howard Lutnick, who oversees the US Census Bureau.

The letter, dated 4^th March and signed by numerous other organisations across the US, called for a reconsideration of the redesign of the 2026 census test, and came in response to a federal register notice published on 3^rd February announcing the proposed changes.

The US government has proposed changes to the 2026 census test including reducing the number of sites from six to two and ceasing testing in rural, remote and tribal areas.

Other changes proposed include not testing the counting of group quarters, using an American Community Survey (ACS) questionnaire instead of a normal decennial questionnaire, limiting internet self-response and trying to use postal workers as census takers.

The letter said that the original six sites chosen for the census test had been picked to make sure that the Census Bureau could “adequately test innovative enumeration strategies and data collection technologies with the goal of making the 2030 Census more accurate and cost effective”.

The sites that were eliminated covered tribal lands within Arizona, Colorado Springs in Colorado, western Texas and western North Carolina, and the Insights Association said that the four areas encompassed rural communities, tribal lands and military installations as well as large regions with limited cell phone service and few physical mailing addresses.

The letter added that “we are concerned that removing these sites will ultimately exacerbate the undercount of historically hard-to-count populations”.

The letter also suggested that offering internet self-response only in English for the census test would force in-field staff to visit homes that would otherwise have responded online.

The length of the ACS survey also made it “inappropriate for use in the 2026 census test”, the letter said.

Howard Fienberg, senior vice-president advocacy at the Insights Association, said: “This new proposed approach to the 2026 census test – an essential piece of planning and executing an accurate 2030 census – could save time and energy by just lighting a huge pile of taxpayer money on fire.”

He added: “An inaccurate decennial census will hobble most every other research study in the country for the next decade, public and private, since most rely on census data for statistical reliability and representativeness.”