Christopher Rants, who served as a Republican state representative from Sioux City for 16 years, filed the lawsuit in U.S. District Court, claiming the bureau's employees had violated the Freedom of Information Act by failing to turn over requested documents. Rants asked for copies of communications among Census employees on June 3 but has not received the documents. Rants told the Des Moines Register in an email that he requested the records and filed the lawsuit because he shares concerns "expressed by many researchers" in a May 27 Associated Press article about proposed changes at the Census Bureau. A government statistician disclosed in the article that the agency may begin including what is known as "synthetic data" in its annual American Community Survey results. The bureau would no longer release information about communities based on survey results of actual people, instead relying on complicated formulas.