by Meghan Maury
Collection of the Week: HEA Title II Report Cards on State Teacher Credentialing and Preparation. ED is revising the annual Title II reports used to collect and publish information about teacher preparation programs and state teacher credentialing systems. The reports collect information including teacher-preparation enrollment and demographics, completion rates, credentialing requirements and assessment pass rates, teacher shortages, and programs identified as low-performing. ED says the revision will remove several items it considers “no longer needed” and update reporting instructions to reflect the Department’s current organizational structure, but the notice does not identify which data elements are being eliminated.
Comments due October 20.
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.
Waste, Fraud, and Abuse (WFA)
Workers Compensation Data Matching Program. DOL is establishing a new agency-wide matching program with Treasury’s Do Not Pay system to identify and recover allegedly improper workers’ compensation payments. The program covers benefits for federal employees, coal miners, energy workers with occupational illnesses, and longshore and harbor workers, and will compare information including names, Social Security or taxpayer identification numbers, and bank account information against federal eligibility databases. Potential matches will be returned to DOL for further review. The program is part of the administration’s broader expansion of automated data matching to identify “fraud, waste, and abuse” in federal programs.
Comments due October 1.DOJ and Treasury Data Matching Agreement. DOJ is establishing a new matching program with Treasury’s Do Not Pay system for the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act and September 11th Victim Compensation Fund. DOJ will submit claimants’ names and Social Security numbers for matching against Do Not Pay databases to identify potential improper payments or ineligible recipients, with date of birth used to validate matches; a match triggers further DOJ review rather than an automatic denial. The program is part of the administration’s broader expansion of fraud, waste, and abuse screening under EO 14249.
Comments due October 2.HHS and Treasury Data Matching Agreement. HHS is establishing a new department-wide matching program with Treasury’s Do Not Pay system covering all HHS grant recipients paid through the Payment Management System. HHS will compare grantee records against Do Not Pay databases to identify potentially improper payments, using identifiers that can include names, taxpayer and entity IDs, addresses, birth dates, sex, contact information, and bank-account information. Potential matches will be returned to the relevant HHS grantmaking agency for review rather than automatically stopping payment. The program is part of the administration’s broader expansion of fraud, waste, and abuse screening and operates under a Treasury/OMB waiver that eliminates the usual requirement for a separate computer-matching agreement.
Comments due October 2.USDA and Treasury Data Matching Agreement. USDA is establishing a new department-wide matching program with Treasury’s Do Not Pay system to identify, prevent, and recover allegedly improper payments across a sweeping range of USDA programs. The program covers more than 100 agriculture, nutrition, rural housing and development, disaster assistance, conservation, and grant programs, and can compare identifying information about beneficiaries, borrowers, grantees, contractors, producers, landowners, and others receiving federal funds against federal eligibility databases. A potential match cannot by itself establish ineligibility or trigger adverse action; USDA must independently verify the information before taking further action.
Comments due October 5.
Education
Consolidated Annual Report (CAR). ED is proposing additional revisions to states’ annual reporting under the Perkins career and technical education program, including changes to financial reporting and updates to align performance data with the new National Career Clusters Framework. The new framework reorganizes CTE programs from 16 to 14 career clusters, which could affect how program outcomes are classified and compared over time. ED also proposes to simplify financial reporting, although the notice does not clearly identify what information would no longer be collected, making it difficult to assess whether the change would reduce transparency or program oversight.
Comments due October 20.
Access to Justice
Census of Tribal Court Systems (CTCS). BJS is reinstating and revising its Census of Tribal Court Systems, last conducted in 2014, to collect updated information from about 378 tribal courts on staffing, functions, caseloads, training, civil and juvenile justice, and court operations. The new survey is intended to capture changes in tribal courts and relevant law over the past decade and begin establishing a time series for tribal-court data. BJS identifies the collection as a reinstatement “with change,” although the notice does not specify the individual questionnaire changes and contemporary supporting documents are not currently available.
Comments due October 2.
Child Welfare
National and State Survey of Child and Adolescent Well-Being (NSSCAW): Site Recruitment and Baseline Data Collection. HHS is launching a new cohort of the National and State Survey of Child and Adolescent Well-Being, the federal government’s major longitudinal study of children and families involved with the child welfare system. The study will survey about 6,000 children and their caregivers in 10 states on physical and mental health, family economic well-being, service needs and receipt, experiences with the child welfare system, foster and kin caregiving, and children’s safety and stability, and will link survey responses with administrative and community-level data.
Comments due September 28.
Housing
Change in Admission and Occupancy Requirements. HUD is renewing requirements for public housing agencies to maintain and make publicly available their written policies governing admissions and continued occupancy, including eligibility, rents, preferences, waiting lists, and other occupancy rules. The estimated number of respondents has declined because there are fewer active public housing agencies, rather than because HUD is reducing the information required.
Comments due September 28.
Labor/Employment
Energy and Jobs Survey. DOE is substantially revising its annual survey of employment and workforce characteristics across the energy sector. The new survey adds information on AI’s workforce effects, environmental-compliance jobs, occupations, recruitment barriers, apprenticeships, and workforce partnerships, while eliminating detailed occupation-level wage and benefit questions. DOE is also “streamlining” demographic reporting: employers would report only the seven minimum federal race and ethnicity categories rather than detailed racial and ethnic groups, which DOE says would reduce burden and produce more reliable data because employers may not maintain detailed information and subgroup counts may be too small to publish. The survey will continue collecting race and ethnicity, gender, age, disability, veteran status, education, and union coverage to analyze the composition of the energy workforce.
Comments due October 5.
ICYMI
Current Mandatory Business Surveys. In a somewhat unusual Federal Register notice, Census formally announces that three of its existing business surveys will be mandatory in 2026: the Annual Integrated Economic Survey, Annual Business Survey, and Business and Professional Classification Report. Together, the surveys collect detailed information on businesses and the economy, including employment, revenue and expenses, business-owner demographics, R&D and innovation, and business activities. The surveys and their data collections have already received OMB approval, and the notice does not appear to establish new requirements or change the information being collected; rather, Census is formally determining that the surveys are necessary and directing that they be conducted on a mandatory basis.
Federal Ballot Mail. USPS is establishing a new federal system of records containing the names and addresses of people receiving mail ballots, the unique barcodes associated with their outgoing and return ballot envelopes, and the state or locality issuing each ballot. The database supports USPS’s new requirements for states using the mail for federal-election ballots and will allow individual ballot mail pieces to be linked to particular voters. USPS says it will not collect ballot contents or party affiliation, but the records may be disclosed to law-enforcement or other government agencies under authorized uses, including DHS when it has a "law-enforcement need" for the data. USPS rejected privacy, election-administration, and data-sharing concerns raised by commenters and made no changes to the system in response.