Judge orders the census to go on another month

Ruling says political representation would suffer with less time.

ORLANDO, Fla. — A federal judge has stopped the 2020 census from finishing at month’s end and suspended a year- end deadline for delivering the numbers needed to decide how many seats each state gets in Congress.

The preliminary injunction granted by U. S. District Judge Lucy Koh in California late Thursday allows the once- a- decade head count of every U. S. resident to continue through the end of October.

Koh said the shortened schedule that the Trump administration had ordered would likely produce inaccurate results that would last a decade.

The judge sided with civil rights groups and local governments that sued the U. S. Census Bureau and the U. S. Department of Commerce, which oversees the statistical agency, arguing that minorities and others in hard- to- count communities would be missed if the counting were to end this month.

In granting the preliminary injunction, the judge said the plaintiffs were likely to succeed at a trial, noting that despite concerns raised by top Census Bureau officials about the shortened schedule, the Trump administration failed to consider its duty to produce an accurate headcount and did not adequately explain its reasoning.

Koh said inaccuracies produced from a shortened schedule would affect the distribution of federal funding and political representation over the next 10 years. The census is used to determine how $ 1.5 trillion in federal spending is distributed each year and how many congressional seats each state gets.

Before the COVID- 19 pandemic hit in March, around the same time the census started for most U. S. residents, the bureau had planned to complete the count by the end of July.

In April, in response to the pandemic, the bureau extended the deadline to the end of October. Then, in late July or early August, the deadline changed again to the end of September after the Republican- controlled Senate failed to take up a request from the Census Bureau to extend the Dec. 31 deadline for turning over the numbers that determine how many congressional seats each state gets.

Attorneys for the Census Bureau had argued that the count must finish by the end of September to meet the Dec. 31 deadline and allow time for crunching the numbers used for deciding how many congressional seats each state gets, in a process known as apportionment. But Koh said that argument “runs counter to the facts.”

“Those facts show not only that the Bureau could not meet the statutory deadline, but also that the Bureau had received pressure from the Commerce Department to cease seeking an extension of the deadline,” she wrote.

Koh’s preliminary injunction suspended that end- ofthe- year deadline, allowing bureau statisticians to process the numbers for apportionment from the start of November until the end of April, for the time being.

Previously, the Census Bureau had only half that time for data processing, from the start of October until the end of December.

The San Jose- based judge earlier this month issued a temporary restraining order prohibiting the Census Bureau from winding down f ield operations until she ruled.

Census and Commerce Department attorneys said Friday they would appeal, and asked the judge to suspend the injunction in the meantime.

“Were the Bureau to miss these deadlines, Congress could well decide to disregard the 2020 census results in conducting apportionment, as it previously did for the 1920 census,” the attorneys for the federal government said in court papers.

Civil rights groups and local governments alleged that the decision to shorten the schedule was made to accommodate a directive from President Trump that tried to exclude people in the country illegally from the apportionment numbers. A three- judge panel in New York blocked that directive as unlawful. The Trump administration is appealing to the Supreme Court.

Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross directed the bureau to come up with a shortened plan, despite top bureau leaders’ concerns, shared internally, that losing a month would produce a count with “fatal data quality f laws,” Koh’s order said.

An email from associate director for f ield operations Tim Olson to colleagues said it was “ludicrous” to believe a full count could be done by Oct. 31, and that anyone thinking the apportionment numbers would be done by Dec. 31 “has either a mental deficiency or a political motivation.”