Republicans on the Senate Commerce Committee have accused the Biden Administration of “manipulating census data to suppress the number of American households connected to high-speed internet via wireless and satellite technologies,” claiming that federal “agencies have deliberately excluded” rural and hard-to-reach “households from a new census data project about U.S. broadband adoption.”
In an October 31, 2024 letter to the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) and Census Bureau, Senate Commerce Committee Ranking Member Ted Cruz (R-TX), Consumer Protection Subcommittee Ranking Member Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), and Sen. Cynthia Lummis (R-WY) suggested that the exclusion was “politically motivated to disenfranchise alternative satellite broadband providers.”
As the letter explained, “Project LEIA (Local Estimates of Internet Adoption), developed by NTIA in partnership with the Census Bureau, aims to produce an experimental model estimating “broadband adoption” to increase understanding on internet issues. Yet, upon inspection of the fine print, this model deliberately excludes wireless and satellite broadband users. While the Project LEIA website claims its estimates offer reliable data on internet adoption for all U.S. counties, it fails to mention the exclusion of millions of American households who rely on wireless and satellite technologies for internet access. This omission results in systemic undercounting and data bias. When the data are wrong, policy outcomes will inevitably suffer.”
The Senators concluded by urging NTIA and the Bureau “to make the necessary changes to ensure accurate representation of broadband adoption, or, lacking reliable data to do so, to abandon this flawed experimental data initiative altogether. The American public relies on accurate and reliable census information, and they deserve nothing less.”
According to Census Bureau officials, they plan to respond to the Senators’ concerns in a follow-up letter.
