It regularly gathers information previously contained only in the long form of the decennial census, including ancestry, US citizenship status, educational attainment, income, language proficiency, migration, disability, employment, and housing characteristics.

No respondents personal information is released, and only used statistically in these data which are used by many public-sector, private-sector, and not-for-profit stakeholders to allocate funding, track shifting demographics, plan for emergencies, and learn about local communities.

[5][6] The Article I, Section II of the Constitution of the United States of 1787, adopted 1788, requires an enumeration of the population every ten years "in such Manner as they (Congress) shall by Law direct".

From the first United States Decennial Census three years later in 1790, congressional legislators understood that it should also collect basic demographic information beyond just the number of people in the household.

James Madison, an American Founding Father and the fourth President of the United States, first proposed including additional questions in the U.S. Decennial Census to "enable them to adapt the public measures to the particular circumstances of the community".

[7] The questions included in censuses since 1790 have reflected American understandings of and concerns about societal trends and the growing nation's expanded data needs.

[8] By 130 years later in 1940, advancements in statistical methods and knowledge enabled the administrators and statisticians / mathematicians of the United States Census Bureau (Bureau of the Census), first established in 1902 within the United States Department of Commerce, to begin asking a sample of the American population a sub-set of additional detailed questions without unduly increasing cost or respondent burden.

Following the 1960 U.S. Decennial Census, federal, state, and local governmental officials, and some in the private sector began demanding more timely long-form-type data.

Lawmakers representing rural districts claimed they were at a data disadvantage, unable to self-fund additional surveys of their populations.

At the Congress's request, the U.S. Census Bureau in the United States Department of Commerce, developed and tested a new design to obtain long-form data.

Noted U.S. statistician / mathematician Leslie Kish, had introduced the concept of a rolling sample (or continuous measurement) design in 1981.

§ 9, census responses are "immune from legal process" and may not "be admitted as evidence or used for any purpose in any action, suit, or other judicial or administrative proceeding".

ACS data are used by public and business decision-makers to more clearly identify issues and opportunities and more effectively allocate scarce resources to address them.

U.S. Representative (congressman) Ron Paul of Texas, who opposes ACS, said that the founding fathers of the United States "never authorized the federal government to continuously survey the American people".

[44] The Census Bureau prefers to gain cooperation by convincing respondents of the importance of participation while acknowledging that the mandate improves response rates (and thus accuracy) and lowers the annual cost of survey administration by more than $90 million.

[45] In 2014, the Census Project, a collaboration of pro-Census business and industry associations, gathered signatures from 96 national and local organizations urging the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Oversight and Government Reform to reject a proposal to make the American Community Survey voluntary.

The letter cited results from a congressionally mandated test of a voluntary ACS that found that mail response rates would drop "dramatically," by more than 20 percentage points.

[47] The resulting loss in quality and reliability would essentially eliminate data for 41 percent of US counties, small cities, towns and villages, many school districts, neighborhoods, remote areas, and American Indian reservations.