Census Bureau director quits after claims he politicized role

Steven Dillingham has resigned as director of the Census Bureau, bringing an early end to a tumultuous tenure that culminated this month in charges that he had allowed politics to override policy at the nation’s premier statistical agency. Dillingham notified the White House that he would leave the agency Wednesday. His term as director had been scheduled to end in December 2021.

Dillingham, who took over the agency in January 2019, cast himself as a seasoned statistical expert who was committed to upholding the Census Bureau’s historically nonpartisan work. But while his principal task was to oversee the 2020 census, even that work was often overshadowed by the Trump administration’s yearslong effort to use the bureau’s population tallies to change rules for reapportioning the House of Representatives and drawing political districts.

The White House installed four high-level political appointees in the Census Bureau and ordered the bureau last year to produce a stateby-state count of immigrants in the country illegally so that they could be deducted from population totals used to reapportion House seats later this year. Dillingham ordered the census count itself curtailed by a month.

The bureau acknowledged this month that it would be unable to produce the immigrant count sought by the administration before President Trump left office. On Friday, a federal court barred the agency from producing any data related to the order before President-elect Joe Biden takes office. Advocacy groups and Democrats in Congress began demanding Dillingham’s resignation last week after the inspector general at the Commerce Department revealed that it had opened an inquiry into his management of the agency.