For all you government-statistics maniacs out there — you know who you are, don’t try to deny it — the big news out of Washington is that the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP), conducted by the Census Bureau for the past quarter-century, is going to go away next year. Its replacement, the Dynamics of Economic Well-Being System (DEWS), is said to be more efficient with money and time, thus increasing the retention rate among sample respondents and freeing up federal cash to help fund the 2010 Census.

It’s actually a bigger deal than it sounds. Because DEWS will be conducted only once a year, rather than the SIPP’s three times, some critics believe it won’t be as accurate a measure of poverty spells, disability prevalence, and participation in federal programs. If the hunger rate goes down, for example, some activists will claim that it is a measurement error, not evidence of improving living standards. And, yes, they’ll say that this was the Bush administration’s nefarious plan all along: to undercount the poor as a prelude to cut poverty programs to finance tax cuts for the wealthy, etc.

As for me, I’m wondering why government-survey acronyms are so moist.