Federal Statistical Infrastructure: The 2025 ACS 1-Year Release Is Delayed by the Commerce Disclosure-Avoidance Order

Federal Statistical Infrastructure: The 2025 ACS 1-Year Release Is Delayed by the Commerce Disclosure-Avoidance Order

The 2025 ACS 1-year estimates — the first full post-retrenchment data year, and the release this topic's ACS watch was counting on — remain delayed indefinitely, and the damage is spreading to the next decennial census. This revision carries the story through early October 2026.

The delay continues, with a soft promise of release "later this year"

The Census Bureau normally publishes the ACS 1-year estimates in mid-September. As of October 2, 2026, the bureau's public information office would only say: "The release date for the 2025 ACS 1-year estimates is being determined... The Census Bureau is assessing the impact of the new departmental administrative order (DAO), Department of Commerce Disclosure Avoidance for Statistical Products, and seeking DAO-compliant solutions to allow the release of the ACS 1-year tables later this year." The June 2026 DAO order bans the bureau's long-standing "noise infusion" privacy technique — "Any use of noise infusion is inconsistent with the Department's policies" — and the bureau's Aug. 17 blog justified the change by "concerns that adding noise made the statistics less accurate and less trustworthy."

On September 4, 2026, a coalition of more than 100 national, state and local business, nonprofit, and academic data users wrote to Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick urging postponement of the DAO order, warning the delay is "unprecedented" and that ACS data are "especially critical to their planning, investment decisions, market strategies, and public services, for example, on behalf of businesses, state and local governments, consumers, veterans, and children."

Politicization concern is now explicit in the scientific press

Science reported in July that scientists view the DAO order as politicization: "The change marks the first time political appointees have dictated the (Census Bureau's) statistical methods¹, census watchers say," and quoted a University of Texas computer scientist saying the administration banned "essentially all modern techniques for preserving privacy in large datasets." The order will also govern the 2030 census.

NEW: The September 10 proposed rule would reshape the 2030 Census itself

On September 10, 2026, Commerce released a proposed rule that would: exclude non-U.S. citizens without a green card from the apportionment base — explicitly including undocumented immigrants, foreign students, and H-1B visa holders; remove race and ethnicity questions (and SOGI questions) from the decennial questionnaire; and narrow "usual residence" to something "consistent with, and evidenced by, their tax records." Comments close October 13, 2026, with more than 20,000 already submitted.

Why this matters for this topic specifically: the decennial and ACS are the backbone datasets for measuring the foreign-born population, and the immigration-surge literature already documents severe ACS undercounts of surge migrants (see The Post-Pandemic Migration Surge: Native Labor-Market Impacts and the Emerging Replication Literature). A 2030 apportionment base that excludes non-citizens would create a definitional break in what "the immigrant population" even means in the census data this topic relies on — a measurement discontinuity that will complicate every future time series on immigration and native labor markets, independent of what the underlying economics is. The delayed 2025 ACS, the DAO order, and the 2030 rule are one story: the federal data infrastructure this topic's adjudication depends on is being rebuilt under political direction, and the near-term casualty is the very data year (2025) that would measure the post-surge retrenchment.