Modernizing data collection has huge payoffs.

I spoke on the Editors podcast today about the need to increase funding for the major statistical agencies. I wanted to put some numbers out there to demonstrate why it makes sense from a fiscally conservative perspective.

The Census Bureau’s annual budget is about $1.5 billion. The Bureau of Labor Statistics’ annual budget is about $700 million. Inflation-adjusted funding has been declining for years. These are not big-spending agencies in a federal government that spends $7 trillion per year. A boost of $100 million per year would be substantial for these agencies and barely noticeable for the federal budget.

The agencies need to modernize their data-collection practices. Other countries have successfully moved to online-first data-collection strategies that require one-time transition funding. Again, this funding boost is in the millions, not billions, of dollars.

And the payoff is huge. The data from these agencies informs trillions of dollars of spending elsewhere in the government. Getting the data right and doing so quickly makes everything else easier.

Bill Beach, Trump’s appointee as BLS commissioner who served from 2019 to 2023, was at the Mercatus Center and the Heritage Foundation for years before being commissioner. He’s a limited-government conservative through and through. And he has been an advocate for statistical agency funding increases. The way he puts it is that modernizing the surveys the BLS uses to do the jobs report would cost about as much as the Department of Defense spends on coffee.

Here’s another way to think about it: The federal government made $236 billion in improper payments last year. That’s 157 Census Bureau budgets’ worth, or 337 Bureau of Labor Statistics budgets’ worth, of mistakes. Cleaning that up and repurposing a fraction of the savings to modernize and improve the statistical agencies to better inform other spending decisions is a no-brainer.