Census Bureau plans to stop production of 3-year ACS data

This is a pretty big loss to the ACS program, but the dissemination piece of the ACS program struck me as pretty daunting. They turnaround the data really quickly and for lots of geographies.

I think if the Census Bureau follows through with this "cost-reduction" plan they won't start it back up. But, they aren't losing the underlying data unlike other cuts federal program make where they cut the sample, variables, etc. This could be resurrected.

So, someone could propose to do this for the Census Bureau via an RDC, but it is a big job. It isn't just a 1-person job and the Census Bureau would want to make sure of quality control, which would use personnel and $$.

We in transportation planning definitly need the 5 year data to get at smaller geography. Every year with this helps. The 3 year misses too many smaller areas, I only minimally used the 3 year. However, the data is still there, its just that the Census does not want to spend the money to summarize the 3 year data. We have all these private companies collecting data from cell phones all the time, but we can't pay to have the federal government summarize its own data. THis is part of that whole cutting of discretionary fudning, time to ask that extra money be found for this, and how much is the savings supposed to be? IF its under a Billion, I say time to fund it as part of the cost of data needed by many including the private sector.

The 3-yeaer ACS file is essential for my research. Besides its necessity for small areas, it is essential for small subpopulations. The 5-year files, although also very useful, have a timeliness implication, by extending the time-lag for estimates. I think that efforts should be made to keep the 3-year files and perhaps savings can be made by eliminating some questions.

I use 3-year estimates for almost everything. Vermont has small counties-in a small state. And a couple more releases would have really helped with being able to look at any kind of trend; 1 year just doesn't work for that here, and I'll be waiting for ever for enough non-overlapping 5-year sets to do that. Thanks Mark for the heads-up!

When I suggested that the 3-year series could be eliminated as long as the 5-year series was retained, I assumed that the 1-year updates would continue. Wouldn't that make it possible to have an annual (rolling) 5-year series update and isn't that what is intended if the 3-year series is eliminated?

It is worth noting that the concerns about margin-of-error on the 5-year products are more a problem of population and sample size for small jurisdictions, and less a problem of the 3-year versus 5-year aggregations.

Larger sample size might allow the Census Bureau to provide finer geographic detail in the 1-year products and would surely improve accuracy in the 5-year.

And (in reply to Oleh) - the Census Bureau just completed an exercise to investigate eliminating questions. That has a much broader impact and is generally not well received in the data user community. Every question has an important purpose.