Dear USET/USET SPF Family,
The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) has published a Federal Register Notice announcing that it is seeking comments to revise its 1997 Statistical Policy Directive No. 15 (SDP 15) on maintaining, collecting, and presenting federal data on race and ethnicity. Comments collected from this Notice will be presented to the OMB Federal Interagency Technical Working Group on Race and Ethnicity Standards (Working Group), which has provided an initial set of revisions outlined in this Notice.
For federal agencies collecting data, the current 1997 SDP 15 requires two separate race and ethnicity questions with the ethnicity question collected before the race question. The ethnicity question is as follows—
- “Are you Hispanic or Latino?”, with response options of:
- “Yes, Hispanic or Latino”, or
- “No, not Hispanic or Latino”.
The race question is as follows—
- “What is your race? <’Mark’ or ‘Select’> one or more”:
- Among the options for ‘race’ are American Indian or Alaska Native (AI/AN).
- AI/AN is defined as, “A person having origins in any of the original peoples of North and South America (including Central America), and who maintains Tribal affiliation or community attachment.”
The Working Group’s initial revisions include—
- Collecting race and ethnicity data together in a single question:
- The Working Group is seeking feedback on this proposal because some respondents, “may not understand a distinction between ‘race’ and ‘ethnicity’.”
- Updates to the SPD 15’s terminology, definitions, and wording:
- Among these proposed revisions include removing, “who maintain Tribal affiliation or community attachment” from the AI/AN definition. This is problematic since it focuses on self-identification by race instead of the sovereign authority Tribal Nations have to determine our citizenship.
- The Working Group also proposes that the AI/AN category be changed to, “the category `American Indian or Alaska Native' includes all individuals who identify with any of the original peoples of North, Central, and South America.”
OMB is requesting comments on the Working Group’s proposed revisions to the 1997 SDP 15 by April 12, 2023. Comments can be submitted to regulations.gov under Docket No. ID OMB-2023-0001-0001. OMB will also be hosting bi-monthly public listening sessions on these proposed revisions. To join a listening session, please email Statistical_Directives@omb.eop.gov. For questions and concerns regarding this Notice and Request for Comments, please contact Bob Sivinski, Chair, Interagency Technical Working Group on race and Ethnicity Standards, at Statistical_Directives@omb.eop.gov.
For more information, please contact Brian Howard, USET SPF Senior Policy Analyst, at bhoward@usetinc.org.
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