Global Courant 2023-05-12 01:54:16
FIRST ON FOX: The U.S. Census Bureau is dangerously close to including awake political ideology in federal poverty studies should it adopt the recommendations of a politically partisan advisory panel, argues Senator Marco Rubio, R-Fla., in a letter to the bureau.
The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) wrote a report that was a “consensus study” led by the Census Bureau, “to improve the Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM)” by adding health care and child insurance to the current threshold, which affects is on according to Rubio the national definition of ‘poverty’.
The Florida Senator expressed concern in a May 11 letter to Census Bureau Director Robert Santos, obtained exclusively by Fox News Digital, stating: “The report ‘An Updated Measure of Poverty: (Re)Drawing the Line ‘ recommends a comprehensive set of changes that would prevent our government from accurately measuring poverty and instead promote progressive political priorities.”
Rubio calls on the NAS to be biased in its proposals and in selecting which members would write the report, arguing that this action violates their “standard of ‘objectivity’.”
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He argues that despite the fact that “the NAS claims to maintain strict ‘institutional standards of quality, objectivity, evidence and responsiveness’, Federal Election Commission records indicate that “several members” of the NAS panel “were members of President Obama’s former Democratic Ways and Means Staffer and advisor to President Obama’s transition team.”
The members also donated “nearly $100,000 to Democratic candidates and causes and $0 to Republican candidates and causes.”
Rubio said “these changes would significantly increase the complexity of a threshold that already yields more than 46,000 different definitions of poverty,” he stated.
The addition of health care allowed the study’s authors to “propose the Affordable Care Act definition of ‘health care needs’ as standard,” and “all households with children have childcare needs” allowed for the “power” of “central framework for childcare and arbitrarily assigning monetary values to parents’ efforts to care for and educate their children, even if they choose a family-centered approach,” making it difficult to discern which families are really “struggling.”
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Senator Marco Rubio speaking at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) on February 25, 2022 in Orlando. Rubio sent a letter to the Census Bureau on May 11, 2023, expressing concern that an investigation into measuring poverty included the vigil’s ideology. (Joe Raedle/Getty Images)
The Republican senator denounced the study’s authors for “exceeding their remit” and accused them of “breaching a sacred trust that has long defined the relationship between research experts and policymakers.”
He further states that members of Congress and the executive branch have worked with academic experts to address “technical issues associated with measuring poverty,” and argues that “accurate measures of poverty are critical tools” that help lawmakers determine whether ” efforts to provide working opportunity for families,” especially those with lower incomes.
The Official Poverty Measure (OPM) threshold was created in 1965 by economist Mollie Orshansky, and lawmakers have relied on it ever since. They are “not purely technical instruments. They indicate a national consensus about the goals of our economy and system of government,” Rubio noted.
He points to a 1995 NAS report, pointing out that the authors stated at the time that “specifying a poverty line is the most judgmental of all aspects of a poverty measure, and we felt it inappropriate for us to make that final, ultimately political, judgment .”
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A Census Bureau’s goal is “to provide the best mix of timeliness, relevance, quality and cost for the data we collect and the services we provide,” according to the bureau’s website. (AP Photo/John Raoux, file)
Rubio claims that the study’s authors also “abandoned the wisdom of their predecessors in favor of political activism masquerading as technical expertise.” He claims that “it is not the place for social scientists to decide which poverty measure the federal government should designate as our ‘principal’ measure, nor has the Census Bureau indicated this in its committee.”
The Florida Republican cited a case in which the NAS sought to defend their work, issuing a “vague” response that a “mistake” “does not change the conclusions” reached, to a letter from “renowned poverty scholars Bruce Meyer and Kevin Corinth,” who concluded there was a “significant flaw in analysis” in a 2019 report regarding “potential effects of child support.”
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Senator Marco Rubio is calling on the NAS to select partisan members for its panel to write a report on measuring poverty. (Al Drago/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
Rubio is calling for “immediate corrective action,” that the Census Bureau should “require the NAS to assemble a new, politically balanced panel to propose an updated set of recommendations,” and that “anything less would amount to failure to of our duty to provide a transparent, fair system of governance for American families, especially Americans living in poverty.”
The U.S. Census Bureau’s mission is “to serve as the nation’s leading provider of quality data on its parole and economy,” and their goal is “to provide the best blend of timeliness, relevance, quality, and cost for the data we collect and services we provide”. offer,” the government agency’s website said.
The Census Bureau did not immediately respond to Fox News Digital’s request for comment.
Emily Robertson is a Fox News digital production assistant.
