[Congressional Record Volume 142, Number 116 (Thursday, August 1, 1996)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E1452-E1453]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




             H.R. 3924, THE STATISTICAL CONFIDENTIALITY ACT

                                 ______
                                 

                        HON. CAROLYN B. MALONEY

                              of new york

                    in the house of representatives

                        Thursday, August 1, 1996

  Mrs. MALONEY. Mr. Speaker, yesterday Rep. Horn and I introduced the 
administration's bill on statistical confidentiality. This bill is the 
culmination of years of work by both Republican and Democratic 
administrations. The Statistical Confidentiality Act is the foundation 
for moving the Federal statistical system into the 21st century.
  Two independent forces join to make this bill timely--balancing the 
budget and the National Performance Review. Federal spending on 
statistics has grown steadily over the last two decades. Over the next 
5 years that trend is likely to be reversed. At the same time, there is 
a general belief that the Federal Government should be smaller and less 
intrusive. This idea was given life in the Clinton administration 
through the National Performance Review which has the goal to create a 
Government that works better and costs less. It is clear that our 
statistical system must develop new ways of providing the information 
we need that are less expensive and less intrusive.
  At the same time the statistical system is being asked to do more 
with less, it is criticized as no longer providing an accurate 
reflection of our society or economy. Economic statistics are routinely 
criticized because they emphasize the manufacturing sector, and pay 
little attention to the service sector. The 1990 census was roundly 
criticized as a failure, and for some communities it was a disaster. In 
May the Wall Street Journal reported on a Kansas town that lost 84 
percent of its population because of an error in the census. That 
error, acknowledged by the Census Bureau last year, will not be fixed 
until next year.

  More objective indicators also point to increasing expense and 
declining quality. Survey response rates have declined steadily since 
the early 1980's making them more expensive and less accurate. Nowhere 
is this more evident than the decennial census, where every 1 percent 
of the public that does not mail back the form costs an additional $25 
million.
  While the statistical system is being asked to do more with less, and 
criticized for declining accuracy, it is also subject to greater 
scrutiny than ever before. The 1990 census was

[[Page E1453]]

notable, in part, because of the intense media coverage--more intense 
than ever before. Alan Greenspan, Chairman of the Federal Reserve, 
pushed the Consumer Price Index to the front pages when he testified 
before Congress that errors in that index were costing the Government 
billions. Last month on the Mall, citizens demonstrated to get the 
Government to change the way it measures race.
  This confluence of social and political currents pushes the Federal 
statistical agencies to find new ways to measure our social and 
economic indicators, as well as define new measures. In short, these 
agencies need to find new ways of doing business. But to do so, they 
need new tools.
  The administration's Statistical Confidentiality bill provides the 
opportunity for agencies to begin charting new ground. This bill 
provides the framework for the research and experimentation that will 
define the statistical system for the new millennium.
  The stated purpose of the bill is ``to provide uniform safeguards for 
the confidentiality of information acquired for exclusively statistical 
purposes, and to improve the efficiency of Federal statistical programs 
and the quality of Federal statistics by permitting limited sharing of 
records for statistical purposes under strong safeguards.''
  In short, this bill allows statistical agencies to share information 
collected from the public to improve statistical measures. It also 
provides strong safeguards that the privacy of those individuals will 
be protected, and that the information, once drawn together, will be 
used only for statistics.
  This bill will enable agencies to redesign surveys to incorporate 
administrative records from other agencies. It will permit agencies to 
develop joint surveys and share the resulting information. It will make 
the development of samples more accurate.
  But not all of the advantages of this bill are speculative. Just this 
year we passed legislation transferring the authorization for the 
census of agriculture from the Secretary of Commerce to the Secretary 
of Agriculture. The major difficulty in writing that legislation was 
crafting language that would allow these two agencies to share 
information. If the Statistical Confidentiality bill were law, that 
effort would not have been needed.
  The administration has put together a bill that lays the foundation 
for developing new, less burdensome, and less expensive ways of 
developing statistical information. This bill, for the first time, 
begins to take a system-wide view of Federal statistics. I congratulate 
my colleague Rep. Horn for introducing this bill, and I look forward to 
working with him to make it law.

                          ____________________