The Commerce Department Has Been Rewriting it's Rules... & It's a Big Deal

The Commerce Department has rewritten the rules on how the Census Bureau and BEA protect confidential data and, having read the Order, it’s a big deal.

On June 4, 2026, Commerce issued Departmental Administrative Order 216-26, "Disclosure Avoidance for Statistical Products." Disclosure avoidance is the set of techniques statistical agencies use to publish useful data without revealing information about any specific person or business. The order changes which techniques are allowed:

"Any use of noise infusion is inconsistent with the Department's policies."

Noise infusion – adding small random distortions to data (the method behind the Census Bureau's differential privacy system used in 2020) is now barred outright, "Noise infusion shall not be used for any statistical product."

In its place: "Coarsening shall be the preferred category of Disclosure Avoidance methods for all statistical products." – rounding, grouping, or using ranges instead of exact figures.

This change directly lands on Census Bureau products (the decennial Census, American Community Survey, economic censuses) and BEA data (GDP, trade, and regional accounts).

Why does this matter?

Coarsening and suppression don't fail evenly. They tend to bite hardest on small geographies and small sub-populations. All they achieve with this order is to trade off one type of data distortion (statistical noise) for another (missing detail or missing values). They are not eliminating distortion.

For economists, planners, and anyone who builds models on ACS or BEA regional data, the order is worth reading in full.

https://lnkd.in/eTfE6fe7