Inside Commerce efforts to break data siloes and improve integrity
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An agency official also encouraged public comment on a proposed overhaul of the census that would eliminate race questions and change who is counted as living in the U.S.
The Commerce Department is building a “stronger database” of administrative records from agencies like the Internal Revenue Service, Veterans Affairs Department, Health and Human Services Department and Social Security Administration, according to Joyce Meyer, undersecretary of Commerce for economic affairs.
“This will allow us to rely more on existing federal agency data and rely less on collecting data,” Meyer said at the Data Foundation’s govDATAx conference Tuesday. “It also allows us to reduce the burden on taxpayers to respond to these lengthy surveys.”
One such combined setup, the Annual Integrated Economic Survey, or AIES, brought seven annual business surveys into one in 2023, Meyer noted.
“It’s a start, but it’s not enough,” Meyer said of the AIES.
A Commerce spokesperson did not return a request for comment on the agency’s efforts to obtain administrative records by the time of publication. Commerce maintains a list of restricted-use administrative datasets available to external researchers at Federal Statistical Research Data Centers that was last updated in September 2023.
An executive order on fraud, waste and abuse signed by President Donald Trump in March 2025 is pushing the Commerce Department to find ways to break down data silos, according to Meyer.
She said the Census Bureau and the Bureau of Economic Analysis have agreed to share more data with each other, including “census microdata” to inform the latter’s work on gross domestic product estimates. Before the enhanced data sharing, the Bureau of Economic Analysis had to rely on publicly available census data to guide analysis of economic indicators.
Data integrity and accuracy measures
The Commerce Department will boost the integrity and accuracy of its data by breaking down data silos, in addition to other initiatives, according to Meyer.
For example, the Census Bureau is working with the U.S. Postal Service ahead of the 2030 Census to further increase data integrity and accuracy, Meyer noted.
Under the partnership, specially trained postal workers visited households in Alabama and South Carolina that did not respond to a 2026 Census Test, according to a press release. Americans are more likely to trust postal workers than unfamiliar Census takers, making them more likely to respond to the Census and increase the accuracy of the count, Meyer argued.
But there are still data collection issues that Meyer says her agency has to address. She signaled that differential privacy — a mathematical framework that is designed to make it impossible to determine whether a particular person’s information is included in a given dataset and showed some people living in lakes in 2020 Census data — is an example of a subpar practice the Commerce Department wants to address.
“It’s yet another example of why we are implementing the president’s gold standard [science] executive order,” Meyer said.
Last week, Commerce proposed a rule that would transform how the census counts people and eliminate questions about race and ethnicity on short-form census documents and other questionnaires.
The proposal specifically says undocumented immigrants and immigrants who are legally in the U.S. but not lawful permanent residents would no longer count toward the apportionment of seats for the House of Representatives. Advocacy groups, such as the liberal Center for American Progress, have critiqued the draft rule as an effort to manipulate voting maps.
Meyer declined to comment on the proposal, stating “I encourage people to participate in the comment process that’s underway and share their perspectives.”