A Trump push to cut ‘statistical noise’ could mean less data from the Census Bureau

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. Anton Petrus/Getty Images

Anton Petrus/Getty Images

A wonky policy change by the Trump administration may spell the end of a wide swath of data from the Census Bureau, including key statistics used for redistricting, policymaking and research.

Federal law requires the bureau to