In the 1970s, the Federal Government developed another set of summary areas for use in statistical presentations based on groupings of States. The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) directed the use of Standard Federal Administrative Regions (SFARs) by all Federal agencies that publish regional data. The SFARs consist of ten regions that cover not only the 50 States and the District of Columbia, but also Guam, Puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands of the United States. The resulting geographic pattern is quite different from the layout of census regions and divisions; New England is the only instance where the two sets of areas coincide.
The SFAR framework resulted from an OMB survey of State officials that sought an arrangement of States different from the traditional regions and divisions. The OMB directive prescribed that Federal agencies publishing data supplied directly by States use the SFARs for such presentations. Other arrangements were permissible, either for special analytical purposes or for maintaining the continuity of a historical data series. On this basis, the Census Bureau continued to use its system of regions and divisions in the 1980 and 1990 decennial census publications.
Tables 6-3 and 6-4 show the numeric schemes for identifying the SFARs and the census regions and divisions. The State identification codes in the SFAR framework are from the Federal Information Processing Standards (FIPS), an official system developed by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (formerly known as the National Bureau of Standards) and maintained by the U.S. Geological Survey. The FIPS State codes are numbered in alphabetic sequence. By contrast, the Census Bureau uses a supplementary set of State codes that follow a geographic sequence within each census division; this permits processing the 50 States and the District of Columbia by geographic division. A one-digit code represents each division; the same number appears as the first digit in the Census Bureau’s two-digit State code. At a separate, higher level, a one-digit code represents each of the four regions.
