On February 6, 2024, the U.S. Census Bureau stated that they were halting changes to how they were going to collect information on the size of the disability population starting 2025.
United Spinal Association sent a comment letter in December opposing the changes to the disability questions and asking for input from the disability community ahead of future changes. The Census Bureau received more than 12,000 comments from all of us. Thank you to all of you who read our talking points and responded to our request to submit comments.
Themes they received from all of us included:
- Desire for more comprehensive public engagement.
- Concern that the existing and proposed questions do not measure more or all types of disabilities.
- Concern regarding a break in the data series if the questions changed, including difficulties comparing data on disability pre-2025 with 2025 and beyond, and a gap in availability of 5-year data products featuring lower-level geography until 2030.
- Requests for and questions about having multiple estimates that reflect the graded response categories in the WG-SS questions. The response categories include: no difficulty, some difficulty, a lot of difficulty and cannot do at all.
- Concern that the proposed use of the international standard cutoff for disability that does not include people reporting “some difficulty,” would decrease the estimate of people living with disabilities.
- A question change could potentially impact program funding and services.
The Census Bureau plans to convene a meeting with federal agency disability stakeholders, disability community representatives, data users, researchers and disability advocates to discuss data needs and data uses surrounding the topic of disability.
Stay tuned for more. Read more here.