ABOUT CNSTAT

The Committee on National Statistics (CNSTAT) was established at the National Academies in 1972 at the recommendation of the President’s Commission on Federal Statistics. Its original mandate was to provide an independent and objective resource for evaluating and improving the work of the highly decentralized U.S. federal statistical system. While it continues to fulfill this mandate, the work of CNSTAT has expanded to include undertaking studies from a broad range of research and program agencies of the federal government.

The Committee convenes expert panels to conduct studies on the data and methods needed to improve our understanding of the U.S. population, the economy, the environment, public health, crime, education, immigration, poverty, welfare, terrorism, and other public policy topics.

The Committee engages the nation’s leading experts in its studies. Committee members and staff are generally statisticians, economists, and other quantitative social scientists with special interests in applications across many scientific disciplines and issues of public policy. Study panel members typically represent a broad range of scientific disciplines relevant to the topic of study. Committee and panel members volunteer their services in the public interest.

Support for the Committee’s activities, which include oversight of its panel studies and the conduct of some special studies, together with semi-annual public symposia on topics of interest to the federal statistical and research communities, is provided by a consortium of federal agencies. Sponsor agencies that contribute to CNSTAT core funding include the National Science Foundation, the National Institute on Aging, the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, the Bureau of Economic Analysis, and other agencies that transfer funding to NSF’s core grant to the Committee, including the U.S. Census Bureau, Social Security Administration, and agencies of the Departments of Agriculture, Defense, Education, Energy, Health and Human Services, Homeland Security, Housing and Urban Development, Justice, Transportation, and Treasury.

The Committee’s reports are highly influential in public policy communities, and in government and academic statistical communities. Among the Committee’s more influential studies are those on poverty measurement, confidentiality and data access, cognitive aspects of survey methodology, cost-of-living indexes, polygraph and lie detection, and the design of the decennial census. Topics of current study include a review of the 2010 census, evaluation of data for estimating children eligible for the Children’s Health Insurance Policy, student eligibility for school nutrition programs, redesign of surveys for the Energy Information Administration, data use from the American Community Survey, measurement of higher education productivity, and subjective measures of well-being.