tl;dr: A June 2026 Commerce Department directive (DAO 216-26) bans differential privacy, noise infusion, and swapping from Census Bureau and BEA publications, restricting confidentiality protection to 1970s-era techniques like coarsening and suppression. Cynthia Dwork and other leading researchers argue this politically motivated order—tied to Project 2025 and aimed at enabling citizenship data extraction—will force a lose-lose tradeoff between useless statistics and violations of the Census Act's confidentiality requirements, since coarsening alone can be trivially reversed via basic algebra when multiple statistics interact. They call on scientists to pressure Congress to rescind the directive.