This report is part of The Economic Indicators Initiative, a think tank collaborative dedicated to producing consensus‑building research on improving key U.S. economic indicators.
In this report, we consider the question of how we can improve the trust we have in the data produced by the federal statistical system. On its face, the question presumes that some measure of trust, be it large or small, has been lost. And indeed, on a number of dimensions, this can be demonstrated to be the case. For example, as reported by the Pew Research Center, overall “Public trust in government” has been declining overall since surveys on public trust began in the 1950s, peaking near 80% early in the 1960s and hovering at around 20% since 2008 (Pew 2025). Certainly, it is not too far a leap to assume that such low levels of public trust in government may translate into a lack of trust in the data produced by federal statistical agencies.
More recent and direct measures—ones based on AmeriSpeak1 household survey panels conducted by the National Opinion Research Center (NORC) in June-August 2025—report on a number of aspects of trust in federal statistics. As summarized in the 2025 report by the American Statistical Association, “The Nation’s Data at Risk: 2025 Report,” the percentage of individuals agreeing or strongly agreeing that statistics provided by federal agencies are generally accurate decreased from 40% to 32% between June and September 2025 (Bowen et al. 2025).
One way to view trust in federal statistical data is to think of it as being a continuum, ranging at the bottom with groups of individuals who have no trust at all in data produced by the government to others at the top that express full faith in the quality of the data and in the integrity and independence of the system of federal agencies producing them. While it is important to understand the perspectives of these groups at both ends of the trust scale, perhaps it is more insightful to think about where we are on average on the continuum and how that position has been changing over time.
While there are no single, readily available metrics for accomplishing this, the Pew’s “public trust in government” data and the 2025 NORC AmeriSpeak panel data suggest it is likely that on average we have been moving steadily toward less trust over time. There are some dimensions that are difficult to explicitly measure that certainly impact trust, such as the degree of political independence of the statistical agencies. There are other dimensions that are measurable and that impact trust through the critical lens of data quality such as collection and response rates, revisions to estimates, and the real value of budgetary resources available over time, among others.
To get a clearer understanding of the challenges faced by statistical agencies in achieving and maintaining trust in the quality of their published data, it is useful to first provide a brief description of the commonly accepted principles and practices of statistical agencies that are viewed as essential to achieving this goal.
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