Data snags cause Trump to miss giving Congress census data

(AP) » The Trump administration missed a deadline for giving Congress numbers used for dividing up congressional seats among the states, as the U.S. Census Bureau works toward fixing data irregularities found during the numberscrunching phase of the 2020 census.

President Donald Trump on Sunday let slip the target date for transmitting the apportionment numbers to Congress. Under federal law, the president is required to hand over the numbers to Congress showing the number of people in each state within the first week of the start of Congress in the year following a once-a-decade head count of every U.S. resident. There are no penalties for missing the deadline.

The president’s tardiness stemmed from the

Commerce Department, which oversees the Census Bureau, missing a year-end target date for giving the apportionment numbers to the president, due to the pandemic and irregularities that were discovered while crunching data from the 2020 census on a shortened schedule.

“The Census Bureau is committed to fixing all anomalies and errors that it finds in order to produce complete and accurate results,” said Deborah Stempowski, an assistant director at the Census Bureau, in a court filing last week.

The census not only decides how many congressional seats each state gets based on population, but it also determines the distribution of $1.5 trillion in federal funding each year.

The earliest date the apportionment numbers will be ready is March 6, as the

Census Bureau fixes anomalies discovered during data processing, Department of Justice attorneys said Monday during a court hearing.

The Department of Justice is representing the Commerce Department and Census Bureau in a lawsuit filed by a coalition of municipalities and advocacy groups in federal court in San Jose, Calif.

If that date holds, the Census Bureau will not finish processing the numbers until weeks after Trump leaves office Jan. 20.