Should we download CPS and ACS data from IPUMS instead of Census?

[MaxGhenis]

IPUMS has an API where you can download microdata: https://developer.ipums.org/docs/v2/apiprogram/apis/microdata/#ipums-cps

Pros:

• Can extract specific columns as we don't need the full files
• Widely used among researchers

Cons:

• IPUMS modifies variable names, which can be good for consistency across time and datasets but also would require changes in our code
• Less primary of a source
• IPUMS does not open-source their transformations

It's not clear whether IPUMS is more or less reliable than census.gov: the recent census.gov outage is the only one I'm aware of, and I don't see a reliability dashboard from IPUMS (their microdata API is also relatively new). If we use census.gov we can also store raw datasets on our own services for backup.