Recently this blog contained a post about a bill to eliminate the American Communities Survey (ACS) altogether . Basically that bill would eliminate some funding within the Commerce Department, and would effectively repeal the Census of Agriculture, the Economic
Census, the Census of Governments, and American Communities Survey. In additional it would largely limit the function of the Census Bureau to conducting the "short
form" decennial census once every ten years, thereby eliminating data collected on poverty, education, income, and basically anything other than age and race.A second bill has now been introduced that would make the ACS voluntary, instead of the current law which makes response mandatory. Effectively the data that would be collected would only come from those willing to share that information, making the data in essence worthless from an analytical standpoint. This would be especially true for small areas such as counties, cities, towns and villages.
This bill can be read at Library of Congress website .
