[The Medical Expenditure Panel Survey (MEPS)] is part of a largely hidden infrastructure of government statistics collection now in the crosshairs of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). In mid-March officials at a unit of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) that runs the survey told employees that DOGE had slated them for an 80-90% reduction in staff and that this would “not be a negotiation”. Since then scores of researchers have taken voluntary buyouts. Those left behind worry about the integrity of MEPS. “Very unclear whether or how we can put on MEPS” with roughly half of the staff leaving, one said. On March 27th, the health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy junior, announced an overall reduction of 10,000 personnel at the department, in addition to those who took buyouts.
There are scores of underpublicised government surveys like MEPS that document trends in everything from house prices to the amount of lead in people’s blood. Many provide standard-setting datasets and insights into the world’s largest economy that the private sector has no incentive to replicate.
Even so, America’s system of statistics research is overly analogue and needs modernising. “Using surveys as the main source of information is just not working” because it is too slow and suffers from declining rates of participation, says Julia Lane, an economist at New York University. In a world where the economy shifts by the day, the lags in traditional surveys—whose results can take weeks or even years to refine and publish—are unsatisfactory. One practical reform DOGE might encourage is better integration of administrative data such as tax records and social-security filings which often capture the entire population and are collected as a matter of course.
As in so many other areas, however, DOGE’s sledgehammer is more likely to cause harm than to achieve improvements. And for all its clunkiness, America’s current system manages a spectacular feat. From Inuits in remote corners of Alaska to Spanish-speakers in the Bronx, it measures the country and its inhabitants remarkably well, given that the population is highly diverse and spread out over 4m square miles. Each month surveys from the federal government reach about 1.5m people, a number roughly equivalent to the population of Hawaii or West Virginia.
The MEPS case suggests how DOGE’s haphazard cuts risk upending an elaborate ecosystem.
Sources in AHRQ say they expect that a skeleton crew will be preserved to run MEPS because the agency is mandated by Congress to collect such data. That is unlikely to be sufficient. Manpower is intrinsic to successful survey research. “You can’t just input data through a machine,” says Steve Pierson, a director at the American Statistical Association. Experience is equally essential.
DOGE has so far spared America’s most prominent number-crunchers at the BEA, BLS and the Census Bureau, which help produce some of the most market-sensitive government data. But their employees are on edge about what may be coming. Even modest funding cuts can reverberate, as agencies reduce survey sample sizes in an effort to save costs, which can produce less reliable results. Tiny variations in survey measures like the Consumer Price Index, which is constructed using both online prices and surveys of brick-and-mortar stores, can cause significant distortions. Entitlements like social security are indexed to CPI, so “if it’s off by even a tenth of a percent, the federal government will overpay or underpay beneficiaries by about a billion dollars a year,” says Erica Groshen, a former commissioner of BLS.
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