# Statistical Policy Directive No. 15 The OMB directive titled *Standards for Maintaining, Collecting, and Presenting Federal Data on Race and Ethnicity*. It sets the race and ethnicity categories every federal agency must use, which is why the wording of the race question on the decennial census form is not the [[Census Bureau]]'s to choose — the Bureau implements a standard written elsewhere. The 2024 revision was issued on **28 March 2024** and announced in the *Federal Register* the following day. It replaced the two-question format with a **single combined race-and-ethnicity question** and expanded the minimum categories to seven, adding **Middle Eastern or North African** for the first time. Implementation has since slipped. An OMB bulletin of **27 March 2026** extended the deadline for CFO Act agencies and the EEOC to submit their Action Plans on race and ethnicity data by a further year, to **28 March 2027**, while stating that OMB was "otherwise making no additional changes to the deadlines for implementing the standards." Like [[Statistical Policy Directive No. 1]], it is a memorandum rather than a statute, administered by a [[Chief Statistician of the United States]] who is not Senate-confirmed and holds no fixed term. What a directive standardises, a directive can unstandardise. ## See also - [[How a Census Question Is Added or Removed]] · [[2030 Census Residence Rule]] · [[Statistical Policy Directive No. 1]] - [[Federal Statistical System Tree]] · [[Census Bureau]] · [[American Community Survey]]