The ABCs of Advancing Racial Justice in Medicaid & CHIP

Everyone deserves the opportunity to lead a healthy life. But racial and ethnic disparities in the American health system—including Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP)—block access to quality health care and damage the overall health and well-being of our nation. This fact sheet offers three recommendations to transform Medicaid and CHIP into anti-racist programs.

Data Equity for Deaf Communities: Rethinking Accessibility, Outreach, & Data Collection in Federal Statistical Programs

Accurate and high-quality data about Deaf or hard-of-hearing individuals and families are crucial for guiding research on Deafness, shaping policy for educational and employment support, enforcing civil rights protections, and providing resources for civic engagement. However, the Census Bureau undercounts and underrepresents Deaf or hard-of-hearing people, and fails to collect data about the use of their primary languages—American Sign Language and other signed languages. This fact sheet highlights several key data concerns and offers recommendations to improve engagement with Deaf and hard-of-hearing people and collect complete and accurate data.

Differential Privacy in the 2020 Census: New Confidentiality Protections & the Implications for Data Users

The Census Bureau is modernizing its confidentiality protections for census responses. At the heart of this new approach is a mathematical definition of confidentiality called “differential privacy.” This fact sheet—published jointly with Data & Society and the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights—provides a brief introduction to differential privacy, outlines the implications of the changes for data users, and encourages stakeholders to provide feedback to the Census Bureau.

Fulfilling a Constitutional Mandate: An Overview of How Census Data are Used to Apportion the House of Representatives

The decennial census is key to the distribution of political power in the United States. The count is the basis for the apportionment–the distribution of seats in the House of Representatives to the states according to their populations. In this joint fact sheet from the Georgetown Center on Poverty and Inequality and Asian Americans Advancing Justice, we provide an overview of the official apportionment process and timeline as a resource for census stakeholders.

Fixing Unemployment Insurance in Response to COVID-19

The novel coronavirus has brought sudden attention to the important role unemployment insurance (UI) system plays in quickly delivering aid to families and stimulus to the economy. This fact sheet, published jointly with The Century Foundation, the Economic Policy Institute, National Employment Law Project, and the National Women’s Law Center, emphasizes the importance of focusing both on immediate changes to help individuals and sustained, structural fixes to fully respond to a crisis of this magnitude and gird the nation for the challenges of a recession and future economic crises.

COVID Response: Getting Cash to Lower-Income Families

The COVID-19 pandemic is devastating to families with low incomes, our communities, and our economy. This fact sheet, published jointly with the National Women’s Law Center, proposes that providing cash transfers to cash-strapped people through EBT is an expedient, cost-effective, and efficient mechanism to help people maintain living standards while quickly boosting our economy.