Daniel Webster, a first-term Republican congressman from Florida, sponsored the relevant legislation to eliminate the American Community Survey. Part of his reasoning was that ‘‘. . .this is not a scientific survey. It’s a random survey.” As you know, and as was pointed out by many, including this quote in the New York Times, ‘‘the randomness of the survey is precisely what makes the survey scientific.” Write a short letter to Congressman Daniel Webster explaining this concept to him.

The American Community Survey, administered by the US Census Bureau, is given every year to a random sample of about 3.5 million households (about 3% of all US households). It has been crucial for government and policy decisions, and helps to determine how over 400 billion dollars of government funds are distributed each year. Unfortunately, the House voted in May 2012 to eliminate this valuable source of information. Data on a random sample of 1% of all US residents are made public (after ensuring anonymity), and we have selected a random sub-sample of n = 1000 from the 2010 data, stored in ACS.