# Statistical Policy Directive No. 1 The OMB directive titled *Fundamental Responsibilities of Federal Statistical Agencies and Recognized Statistical Units*, issued in 2014. It states the four obligations every federal statistical agency operates under: 1. produce relevant and timely information, 2. conduct credible and accurate statistical activities, 3. conduct objective statistical activities, and 4. protect respondents' trust through confidentiality and exclusive statistical use. It also requires the **parent department** to enable the agency to meet them. That second half makes the directive a protection against the department and not only a professional code for the agency. ## Independence by memo The vault's statistical-system maps keep arriving at one finding. The thing that reads like independence in the federal statistical system is a memo ([[Federal Statistical System Tree]]). Only four of the thirteen principal statistical agencies have Senate-confirmed heads, and none of those heads is protected from removal. What insulates the rest is this directive, issued and administered by the [[Chief Statistician of the United States]]: a branch chief inside [[Office of Management and Budget]] who is not Senate-confirmed, holds no fixed term, and changed twice between July 2025 and January 2026. ## Two layers of hardening, and their limits - **Statute (2018).** Title III of the [[Foundations for Evidence-Based Policymaking Act]] — the 2018 rewrite of the [[Confidential Information Protection and Statistical Efficiency Act]] — wrote the four responsibilities into law at 44 U.S.C. § 3563 and directed OMB to issue implementing rules. - **Regulation (2024).** The resulting "Trust Regulation," 5 C.F.R. Part 1321, was published October 11, 2024 and took effect December 10, 2024. It requires parent agencies to: - present statistical agencies' budgets separately, - give them authority over their own staffing and websites, - leave release dates and content alone, and - defer to them on methodology. Parent agencies had one year to revise conflicting policies. The floor is now real, but it is a floor with a trapdoor. A future OMB can amend Part 1321 by ordinary notice-and-comment. The operating detail underneath it, including the release discipline in SPD No. 3 and the race and ethnicity standard in [[Statistical Policy Directive No. 15]], remains directive. Neither the statute nor the regulation protects any agency head from removal. ## What 2025–2026 tested - **Removal.** [[Erika McEntarfer]] was fired as BLS commissioner on August 1, 2025, the day of a weak jobs report. Nothing in SPD 1 or Part 1321 speaks to removal ([[BLS Data Integrity Crisis]]). - **Methods.** [[Disclosure Avoidance for Statistical Products]] (DAO 216-26, June 2026) is a Secretary-level order dictating the disclosure-protection method the [[Census Bureau]] and [[Bureau of Economic Analysis]] may use. Part 1321 assigns exactly that kind of methodology call to the statistical agency. Whether the order complies with the Trust Regulation is the most direct test the regulation has faced, and so far nobody has made it answer the question. - **Structure.** The FY2026 budget proposed moving the [[Bureau of Labor Statistics]] into Commerce under the same under secretary as Census and BEA, alongside double-digit staffing cuts. The regulation requires parent agencies to present statistical budgets separately; it does not stop the parent from cutting them. ## See also - [[Federal Statistical System Tree]] · [[Chief Statistician of the United States]] · [[Interagency Council on Statistical Policy]] - [[Statistical Policy Directive No. 15]] · [[Paperwork Reduction Act]] · [[Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs]] - [[The Politics of Official Statistics]] · [[BLS Data Integrity Crisis]] · [[Census Data Products Tree]]