Nancy Potok (Chief Statistician of the United States)

January 2018

Chief Statistician of the United States Nancy Potok and the Office of Management and Budget’s Statistical and Science Policy Branch are working to establish priorities and coordinate research efforts across the federal statistical system. Efforts to improve federal statistics include a priority to use new methodologies and techniques for combining data from multiple sources.

To this end, the Request for Information identifies five key points: "(1) Current and emerging techniques for linking and analyzing combined data; (2) on-going research on methods to describe the quality of statistical products that result from these techniques; (3) computational frameworks and systems for conducting such work; (4) privacy or confidentiality issues that may arise from combining such data; and (5) suggestions for additional research in those or related areas."

Here is the complete Federal Register notice. The deadline to respond is March 13.

“I applaud this ambitious undertaking and am pleased that OMB is seeking broad input on these critical questions,” said AERA Executive Director Felice J. Levine. “Recognizing the considerable potential for the field, AERA is developing a response and encourages our members to submit contributions as well.” 

Last year the National Academies of Science released the Federal Statistics, Multiple Data Sources and Privacy Protections, an important document addressing this shared goal.