The Committee on National Statistics (CNSTAT) was established in 1972, at the recommendation of the President’s Commission on Federal Statistics, to improve the statistical methods and information on which public policy decisions are based. The Committee serves as an integrative force for the nation’s decentralized federal statistical system through its wide-ranging studies on statistical applications in public policy and its ongoing review of statistical policy activities of the Executive Branch and Congress.

The Committee convenes expert panels to conduct studies on the data and methodology needed to improve our understanding of the U.S. population, the economy, the environment, public health, crime, education, immigration, poverty, welfare, terrorism, and other public policy topics. The Committee also furthers the application of statistics to better implement and evaluate federal programs and works to improve statistical methods for application to public affairs, to private sector decision-making, and to social, economic, and other scientific research.

The Committee draws on its parent institutions within the National Academies—the National Research Council, the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, and the Institute of Medicine—to engage the nation’s leading experts in its studies. Committee members and staff are generally statisticians, economists, and other quantitative social scientists with special interests in applications across many scientific disciplines and issues of public policy. Study panel members typically represent a broad range of scientific disciplines relevant to the topic of study. Committee and panel members volunteer their services in the public interest.

Panel studies are typically supported by agencies or foundations that seek the advice. Support for the Committee’s general activities, including oversight of its panel studies and the conduct of some special studies, is provided by a consortium of federal agencies through a National Science Foundation grant.

The Committee’s reports are highly influential in public policy communities and in both government and academic statistical communities. Among the Committee’s more influential studies are those on poverty measurement, confidentiality, cognitive aspects of survey methodology, cost-of-living indexes, the polygraph and lie detection, and the design of the decennial census. Topics of current study include a major review of the 2000 census and of plans for the 2010 census, the measurement of racial discrimination, confidentiality and data access, software engineering and statistical practice in defense acquisition, the development of a national ballistics data base, the poverty index, measures of food security, data to support food and nutrition programs, national accounting for non-market activities, estimation using the American Community Survey, data on the nation’s research and development enterprise, data on entrepreneurship and small businesses, data on highway traffic for international trade, and the development of key national indicators.