Imagine a nation that does not know where its residents were born, how much they make, what type of housing they are living in, where they work or how they get to their jobs. This nation would not even know what percent of its population had finished high school or college, what type of heating fuel households are using, how many are going without health insurance, what the divorce rate is, or where its veterans are living.

This would be a nation without a sense of self, without data to plan for the future. No road map. No GPS. This would be a nation that would not know how to allocate resources or spend its money effectively.

The United States of America could soon become this nation.

House Republicans have recently voted to cut funding for a myriad of programs, including something known as the American Community Survey. If you’ve never heard of it before, the American Community Survey, or ACS, is administered by the Census Department and has, in effect, replaced the “long form” that a sample of residents would get every 10 years.

Begun in 2005, the ACS collects detailed information from a random sampling of Americans each year and provides a nuanced picture of what our nation (not to mention states, counties and neighborhoods) looks like, lives like, and how much we earn, how we commute, whom we live with, and a host of other data points that are not part of the regular census form. In fact, without the ACS, all we would have is an every-ten-year population count that includes age, race, and household composition. Nothing else.

Not only would we not have information on place of birth, income, type of housing, languages spoken or percent of people living in poverty, we would not have any sense of trends — no idea if these numbers were going up or down in one state, county or neighborhood, or another. We would be unable to evaluate the effectiveness of social, economic or immigration policies. In other words, we would be a nation lost and without directions.

The American Community Survey is too valuable to our planners, activists, advocates, businesses (of all sizes), researchers, municipal agencies, transportation authorities, and our nation itself to be on the chopping block in the name of our so-called budget crisis (that is really a revenue crisis). It currently costs taxpayers about $242 million annually (or about 77 cents per capita — less than the cost of one day of war in Afghanistan), which I would say is money very well spent. There is still hope that it will be saved by the Senate or in budget negotiations, but its defunding by House Republicans is a testament to short-sightedness. We should not trust them to invest properly in our nation’s future.

Ed. note: Jost is deputy director of University Neighborhood Housing Program. A version of this opinion piece appeared in the  Sept. 6-19 print edition of the Norwood News.