Census Bureau gets back to the task

With Trump orders revoked by Biden, some more confident of fair count

Battered by criticism that the 2020 census was politicized by the Trump administration, the U.S. Census Bureau under a new Biden administration has the tall task of restoring confidence in the numbers that will be used to determine funding and political power.

Picking up the pieces of a long, fractious process that spooled out during a global pandemic starts with transparency about irregularities in the data, former bureau directors, lawmakers and advocates said.

They advised the new administration to take more time to review and process population figures to be sure they get them right. The high-stakes undertaking will determine how many congressional seats and Electoral College votes each state gets as well as the distribution of $1.5 trillion in federal spending each year.

“We are optimistic that things at the Census Bureau will be better. The question is whether the damage caused by the Trump administration can be rectified,” said Marc Morial, president and CEO of the National Urban League. Morial’s organization, along with other advocacy groups and municipalities, sued former President Donald Trump’s administration last year over a decision to end the once-adecade head count early.

According to critics, that damage includes a failed effort to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census questionnaire and a Trump order to figure out who is a citizen and who is in the U.S. without documentation. They say another Trump directive to exclude migrants from the apportionment of congressional seats, shortened schedules to collect and process data, and four political appointments to top positions in the bureau also threatened the count’s integrity.

Census workers across the country have said that they were encouraged to falsify responses in the rush to finish the count so the numbers used for determining how many congressional seats each state gets could be produced under the Trump administration. Census Bureau officials said such problems were isolated.

Census advocates were heartened Wednesday by President Joe Biden’s quick revocations of Trump’s order to produce citizenship data and his memo attempting to exclude people in the U.S. without documentation from the apportionment count. The Biden administration also has pledged to give the bureau the time it needs to process the data.

The Census Bureau said Thursday that redistricting data it’s releasing later this year for states and municipalities to use in creating legislative districts won’t include information on citizenship or immigration status. It also said the agency is suspending all work on trying to produce the immigration status of U.S. residents for the census.

“President Biden’s swift action today finally closes the book on the Trump administration’s attempts to manipulate the census for political gain,” said Dale Ho, director of the ACLU’s Voting Rights Project, who argued against the legality of the apportionment memo before the U.S. Supreme Court last year. The court ruled that any challenge was premature.

After the bureau missed a year-end deadline for turning in the apportionment numbers, it said the figures would be completed as soon as possible. Trump administration attorneys recently said they won’t be ready until early March because the bureau needs time to fix irregularities in the data.

Trump’s four political appointments to the bureau last year were denounced by statisticians and Democratic lawmakers worried they would politicize the count. The Office of Inspector General last week said two of them had pressured bureau workers to figure out who is in the U.S. without documentation before Trump left office, with one whistleblower calling the effort “statistically indefensible.”

Then-Census Bureau Director Steven Dillingham ordered a technical report on that effort but halted it after blowback. He resigned this week after Democratic lawmakers and civil rights groups called for his departure.