Advocacy groups demand resignation of Census Bureau chief
A coalition of civil rights groups on Wednesday called for the resignation of U.S. Census Bureau director Steven Dillingham after the bureau’s watchdog agency reported that bureau statisticians were being pressured to figure out who is in the U.S. illegally in the waning days of the Trump administration. Dillingham was undermining the statistical agency ’s standards for data quality in order to comply with an order from President Donald Trump that was “motivated by partisan objectives,” leaders of the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials, Asian Americans Advancing Justice and The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights said in a statement.
“We do not lightly come to the conclusion that he should resign,” the statement said.
Census Bureau directors have five-year terms and Dillingham’s tenure does not end until the end of the year.
The resignation demand came a day after the Office of Inspector General reported that two Trump appointees in top positions at the Census Bureau, Nathaniel Cogley and Benjamin Overholt, were driving the efforts to figure out the citizenship status of every U.S. resident as part of the 2020 census.
The appointments of Cogley and Overholt last year were highly criticized by statisticians, academics and Democratic lawmakers, who worried they would politicize the oncea-decade census.
Dillingham has set a Friday deadline for bureau statisticians to provide him a technical report on the effort, whistleblowers told the Office of Inspector General.
“Bureau officials are concerned that incomplete data could be misinterpreted, misused, or otherwise tarnish the Bureau’s reputation,” said Inspector General Peggy Gustafson in the memo to Dillingham.
Gustafson’s memo asked Dillingham to answer what he intends to use the information for and why he was making it a top priority. The Census Bureau did not immediately respond to a request for comment Wednesday.
Trump two years ago ordered the Census Bureau to use administrative records to figure out who is in the country illegally after the Supreme Court blocked his administration’s effort to put a citizenship question on the 2020 census questionnaire. The statistical agency has not publicly said what method it’s utilizing to do that.
Information about the citizenship status of every U.S. resident could be used to implement another Trump order seeking to exclude people in the country illegally from the count used for divvying up congressional seats and Electoral College votes, as well as the annual distribution of $1.5 trillion in federal spending, among the states.
An influential GOP adviser had advocated excluding them from the apportionment process in order to favor Republicans and non-Hispanic whites. Trump’s unprecedented order on apportionment was challenged in more than a half-dozen lawsuits around the U.S., but the Supreme Court ruled last month that any challenge was premature.
The ability to implement Trump’s apportionment order is in jeopardy since the processing of the data is not scheduled to be done until early March, many weeks after Trump leaves office and President- elect Joe Biden is sworn in Jan. 20. Biden has said he opposes the effort.
When asked Monday whether it had devised a method for determining citizenship, the Census Bureau said in a statement that the 2020 census data was still being processed and that needed to be finished before the presidential order could be implemented.
In a tweet, U. S. Sen. Jeanne Shaheen said Trump had made a mission out of manipulating the 2020 census.
“His politicization of the 2020 census has been dangerous & destructive to our democratic institution. That ends in 8 days. I’ll work w/the Biden admin to see these policies reversed & repair the damage Trump caused,” Shaheen, a New Hampshire Democrat, tweeted Tuesday.
The whistleblowers told the Office of Inspector General that the Census Bureau has not set rules for categorizing the citizenship status of U.S. residents. Bureau statisticians also do not fully understand the data since portions came from outside the bureau and they are worried incomplete data could be misinterpreted, they said.