Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts sent letters Wednesday to Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and other Trump administration officials demanding an explanation for why the Commerce Department quietly stripped language banning "inappropriate influence" from its scientific integrity policy, according to a report carried by NPR member station KPBS. The Census Bureau falls under the Commerce Department's authority.

The policy revision was made on August 19 — one day after the Census Bureau published a controversial document on noncitizen voting co-authored by researchers with ties to the America First Policy Institute, a claim outside experts have criticized on methodological grounds. Warren, the top Democrat on the Senate Banking Committee, is asking whether the White House's Office of Management and Budget — which coordinates federal statistical agencies — played a role in the change.

Part of a wider pattern

Warren's letter places the integrity-policy change alongside other recent moves at the Bureau: an administration decision in June to end a decades-old data-privacy protection technique used in census releases, and a September proposal to exclude certain noncitizens from the apportionment count while eliminating collection of some racial and ethnicity data, per WLRN's report on the letters.

"You owe the public a clear explanation of why the Department removed this language," Warren wrote to Lutnick.

Warren's letters also went to the Federal Reserve, which relies on Census Bureau data to track the economy; a Fed spokesperson indicated the central bank intends to respond to her inquiry. As of Thursday, the Commerce Department and the Office of Management and Budget had not publicly commented on the policy change or Warren's letter.

Warren has set an October 7 deadline for detailed answers from Lutnick's department. The dispute lands at a sensitive moment for federal statistics: the Census Bureau's data underpins everything from congressional redistricting fights already playing out in multiple states this cycle to Federal Reserve economic forecasting, meaning questions about the reliability or political neutrality of that data could reverberate well beyond the midterms.