Review the Supplemental Poverty Measure

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Printed page 682 21. Department of Commerce

“The Census Bureau should review the Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM) to consider whether it provides an accurate measure for use by the Council of Economic Advisers and others.”

What has happened

Sep 6, 2026 Not started
Nothing found, and the negative now reaches both ends of the Quote. **The Census Bureau** did not review the Supplemental Poverty Measure: it published no notice, methodology change or review of it, the only in-window Federal Register document containing the phrase is HHS's annual update of the poverty guidelines (which uses the official measure, not the SPM), and the Bureau's own SPM topic pages show the measure continuing unaltered — *Poverty in the United States: 2024* published on 2025-09-09 on the same annual cycle as its 2023 and 2022 predecessors. The Bureau's one page devoted to changing the measure, *Improvements to the Census Bureau's Supplemental Poverty Measure*, offers a single paper, *Improvements to the Census Bureau's Supplemental Poverty Measure for 2021*, comparing 2019 estimates against 2021 methodology; there is nothing later. **The Council of Economic Advisers**, the consumer of the measure the Quote names, published nothing on it either: its research index runs to four pages and roughly forty items back to June 2025, on tariffs, the One Big Beautiful Bill, energy, drug pricing, stablecoins, the CFPB, housing affordability and state income taxes, and none of them is about poverty measurement.
- Census Bureau: Improvements to the Census Bureau's Supplemental Poverty Measure — the Bureau's index of changes under consideration, offering one 2021 paper (as observed 2026-09-06; the page carries no date of its own beyond a template revision stamp, so it is dated at the observation and is approximate)
  Primary Executive branch Sep 6, 2026
- Council of Economic Advisers — Research & Reports index, as observed 2026-09-06; the page carries no date of its own, so it is dated at the observation and is approximate
  Primary Executive branch Sep 6, 2026

Research log

What was searched, and what didn’t count as evidence

Research notes

Cluster negative search CENSUS-1 (chapter log): a jq pass over all 83 in-window Federal Register records whose agency is the Census Bureau — every information-collection notice, every deregulatory rule and every 2030 Census operational notice — plus the DOC/CENSUS slice of reginfo.gov’s Unified Agenda (seven RINs: boundary-date, seal, population-estimate-challenge, decennial-release, personal-data and fee housekeeping), plus grep -i census over nominations.ndjson (0 records) and over presidential-actions.ndjson (0). "Supplemental Poverty Measure" returns exactly one in-window Federal Register document (HHS’s 2026-01-15 poverty-guidelines notice), which was opened; a quoted phrase returning one identifiable non-match is a usable negative. Also searched: "poverty measure" restricted to the Commerce Department slug, and the Census slice of the Corpus for poverty (the Current Population Survey ASEC clearances, which produce the SPM and were renewed unchanged).

Read-queue ticket 07, 2026-09-06. The CEA pages the row asked for were read. whitehouse.gov/cea/ carries the Council’s whole output as a paginated “Research & Reports” list, and the pagination has a trap worth recording: whitehouse.gov/cea/page/2/ answers a 200 carrying the site’s own 404 page, while the parameter the list actually uses — whitehouse.gov/cea/?query-54-page=2 — works and returns genuinely different items for 2, 3 and 4 (control-tested by diffing the byte counts: 265,490 / 265,065 / 254,390, against 264,253 for page 1). All four pages were read. Nothing on the Supplemental Poverty Measure, on the official poverty measure, or on poverty measurement of any kind.

Action: other
Object: Supplemental Poverty Measure
ID: 1894