[joshred]

I work for state government. We've used the ACS survey to try and determine whether we were unfairly targeting non-native English speakers with some of our decisions. It's also used a lot in academia.

If I had to guess, commercial organizations have access to more invasive and higher quality data that they obtain through credit card companies, lexus-nexus or other data brokers. This attitude mostly harms organizations involved in the social sciences.

[stackskipton]

I used to work for commercial organizations that sold marketing data and when some Republican senator came out against ACS, there was a bunch of activity to lobby hard to keep it. If we didn't need it, we wouldn't have spent all that money.

We mainly used it as cheap check of things and checksum against data we were getting. Without it, it would have been big blow.