Plan to End Study Comes Under Fire.

This article reports that more than 400 social scientists have signed a letter protesting the U.S. administration's plan to discontinue the Survey of Income and Program Participation, a 22-year-old project that measures American households' income, insurance, and use of government programs. The Commerce Department's budget proposal for the 2007 fiscal year calls for the termination of the survey, which is administered by the U.S. Census Bureau and is commonly known as the SIPP. The Census Bureau's budget would provide $5.6-million toward designing a potential successor to the SIPP, but no long-term funds have been allocated for such a successor, and some scholars say that the bureau's plans, as they have been sketched so far, seem woefully inadequate.