by Meghan Maury
Proposed Rule of the Week: Removal of Reporting Requirements. EEOC is proposing to abolish all six federal EEO workforce reports and their related recordkeeping requirements, ending the annual EEO-1 collection from large private employers and covered federal contractors as well as reporting by apprenticeship programs, unions, state and local governments, public schools, and colleges. The government would lose standardized data showing how workers are distributed by race and ethnicity, sex, occupation, salary level, and other employment categories. Although EEOC argues that the reports are burdensome, potentially unconstitutional, and may encourage discrimination, the data have long supported enforcement, employer self-assessment, research, and public accountability; eliminating them would leave the agency more dependent on individual complaints and case-specific requests, making systemic discrimination substantially harder to identify and document.
Comments due August 24.
Every time the government makes a change to a survey or a form — or introduces a new survey or form — you have the right to weigh in on that decision. The Take Action! newsletter highlights surveys or forms the government is changing, renewing, or introducing. Click the links to tell the government what you think about the changes they are making.
Note: The Take Action tab of dataindex.us provides information about even more surveys, forms, evaluations, and records notices than are listed in your weekly newsletter.
Science and Technology
ATUS Artificial Intelligence (AI) Questions. BLS is proposing a new two-minute module for the American Time Use Survey that would ask whether and how people use AI and link those responses to their 24-hour activity diaries. Beginning in 2027, the questions would produce nationally representative data on AI use across tasks, demographic and occupational groups, and work, education, household, and leisure activities.
Comments due September 8.
Education
National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) 2027 Amendment 1. NCES is finalizing materials for the 2027 NAEP grade 8 science pilot, which will be administered primarily on school devices and will not produce publicly reported achievement results. NAEP will continue using the 1997 SPD 15 race and ethnicity standards for 2027 while developing plans for the 2024 standards and has replaced references to gender with binary sex categories of male and female.
Comments due August 22.
Civil Rights
NASA Assurance of Civil Rights Compliance. NASA is revising the civil-rights compliance form required from grant and cooperative-agreement applicants by removing references to DEI, gender identity, and the revoked federal language-access order, while adding shared-ancestry protections, including antisemitism, and a new requirement to report harassment allegations. The form will continue to collect information about discrimination complaints and compliance reviews, but the changes narrow its explicit recognition of LGBTQ and language-access protections; NASA is also removing a section linking recipients to civil-rights guidance because it no longer maintains that website.
Comments due August 20.
Health
HHS Registration of an Institutional Review Board Form. HHS is simplifying the registration form for institutional review boards by eliminating the requirement to submit a roster listing each member’s sex, degrees, scientific role, expertise, and institutional affiliation. IRBs will still be legally required to maintain current rosters and meet federal standards for expertise, independence, and diverse membership, but HHS and FDA will no longer receive the information routinely through registration, reducing the agencies’ ability to monitor whether boards overseeing human-subject research are appropriately constituted and representative.
Comments due August 19.Medicare Current Beneficiary Survey. CMS is extensively revising the Medicare Current Beneficiary Survey beginning in 2027, replacing much of its broad access-to-care section with expanded questions on care coordination, trust in providers, and prior authorization, and adding questions on prescription-drug discount programs, nutrition, and hypertension management. It will remove or streamline questions on vaccine costs, religious affiliation, satisfaction with care, preventive screening, diabetes and incontinence management, and facility residents’ health, functioning, and billing. CMS will also introduce a web-based survey option for facilities.
Comments due August 24.Healthy Start Evaluation and Quality Improvement. HRSA is revising the participant-level forms used to evaluate the Healthy Start maternal and infant health program by clarifying instructions, updating and separating unspecified response options, and adding fields for the month of an infant’s birth or death. The notice does not provide draft forms or identify the affected categories, making the full extent of the changes unclear, but at a minimum this revision will formalize the removal of gender identity questions from the forms.
Comments due September 8.
Disaster Management
Disaster Home Loan Application. SBA is revising the disaster home loan application used by homeowners and renters after declared disasters. The changes replace the voluntary gender question with a binary sex question and remove “Other;" revise criminal-history screening to ask about incarceration following a conviction or an indictment for a felony or crime involving financial misconduct or false statements; and add consent for SBA to verify applicants’ information against Social Security Administration records. SBA is also standardizing required fields and instructions and updating electronic-communications language and website links.
Comments due August 19.Disaster Business Loan Application. SBA is revising the disaster business loan application used by businesses and nonprofits after declared disasters. The changes replace the voluntary gender question with a binary sex question and remove “Other;" revise criminal-history screening to ask about incarceration following a conviction or an indictment for a felony or crime involving financial misconduct or false statements; and add consent for SBA to verify applicants’ information against Social Security Administration records. SBA is also standardizing the form’s required fields and instructions and updating website links.
Comments due August 19.
Labor/Employment
Current Population Survey-Basic Labor Force. BLS is seeking to continue the monthly Current Population Survey, which produces national employment and unemployment statistics and allows labor-force outcomes to be analyzed by characteristics including age, sex, race and ethnicity, education, disability, and family composition. The survey also measures people who have stopped looking for work because they believe no jobs are available. BLS doesn't seem to be making any substantive changes to the survey at this time.
Comments due August 24.
ICYMI
Notice of Public Data Asset Release Under the Open, Public, Electronic, and Necessary (OPEN) Government Data Act. CMS will publicly release provider-level Medicaid prescription-drug spending and enrollment data from 2018–2024, including billing and prescribing providers, drugs, claim counts, payments, and enrollment status. The data are aggregated and de-identified, with small cells suppressed, and could support useful research and accountability; however, CMS explicitly frames the release as helping the public identify fraud, waste, and abuse even though the files may include denied claims, missing-value codes, and state-level coding differences that could be mistaken for evidence of wrongdoing.