Federal Statistical Coordination Today: A Disaster or a Disgrace?

Federal statistical coordination is dead. After four decades of episodic but declining support, the Office of Management and Budget has dismantled its limited capacity for statistical policy and coordination.Failure to reestablish a strong central statistical policy function as a separate unit in the Executive Office of the President will slowly but inevitably lead to a decline in the quality, integration, and relevance of national statistics, to say nothing of the waste of statistical resources.There is an immediate, quite serious threat to the integrity of federal statistics.OMB statistical policy personnel and decisions are now absorbed in an organization devoted in fact to regulatory policy and paperwork burden reduction.Forty years of periodic disasters have become an intolerable national disgrace.