Hansi Lo Wang (he/him)

Brodsky said: "I understand that there was a proposal made, and I assume that that will be clarified. And we'll do whatever is required under the law."

Gallo said: "As far as I'm concerned, you have to have the courts and Congress make the decision."

Both Brodsky and Gallo said they believe USPS does not have the authority to refuse to mail absentee ballots that are sent to voters by election officials.

Brodsky said he's voted by mail three times and called it a "wonderful way to vote." Gallo said he has never voted by mail. Asked whether he believes mail-in voting now is safe and secure, Gallo said: "That's a very good question. I would say ... under the proper guidance and monitoring, yes."

On whether they support privatizing the mail and package delivery operations of USPS, Gallo said, "I would not privatize the post office. Brodsky said: "I don't really have a view on whether or not privatizing it would make any sense or not."

I've asked the bureau's public information office why these top search results for "noise infusion" on its website are no longer available to the public:

- https://www.census.gov/library/working-papers/2014/adrm/ces-wp-14-30.html

- https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/susb/about/glossary.html

- https://www2.census.gov/ces/wp/2014/CES-WP-14-30.pdf

- https://www.census.gov/topics/business-economy/disclosure.html

These top search results for "differential privacy" on the bureau's website are also no longer available to the public:

- https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/decennial-census/decade/2020/planning-management/process/disclosure-avoidance/differential-privacy.html

- https://www.census.gov/library/fact-sheets/2023/dec/about-differential-privacy.html

Federal law requires the Census Bureau to keep people anonymous in its statistics. And for decades, the bureau has stripped away names and addresses from census responses before turning them into anonymized data.

But even in a sea of statistics, certain households — particularly those in the minority of a community — can stick out because they live in isolated areas or have other distinctive characteristics that could make it easier to reveal who they are.

Injecting statistical noise has been one of the additional privacy protections that the bureau has used for decades. Spokespeople for the Commerce Department, which oversees the bureau, did not immediately respond to NPR’s questions about why the ban on noise was issued.

For the 2020 census, no statistical noise was added to the state-level population numbers used to redistribute congressional seats and Electoral College votes.

But last year, the bureau said it was planning to keep using noise for neighborhood-level results from the #2030Census.

I’ll keep monitoring how the Trump administration’s ban on statistical noise affects the #2030Census and other Census Bureau surveys. For now, some data experts are concerned that this could limit the data that the bureau can release.

For a deeper dive into how statistical noise was used in certain 2020 census data (as part of the hotly-contested privacy protection system based on a mathematical concept known as differential privacy), here's my explainer from 2021:

Questions I have asked the Commerce Department’s public affairs office:

- Why did the commerce secretary decide that any use of noise infusion is inconsistent with the department's policies?

- Why did the secretary decide for coarsening to be the preferred category of disclosure avoidance methods for all statistical products?