Census officials feel pressure to rev up virus-delayed count

WASHINGTON — As the 2020 census struggles to find its footing amid the coronavirus outbreak and public reluctance to give the government personal data, officials have a new worry: The Trump administration and Senate Republicans appear to be signaling that they want the census finished well ahead of schedule, pandemic or not.

With almost 40% of the nation’s households still uncounted, including the hardest-to-reach populations that are disproportionately poor, people of color and young, the Trump administration took the Census Bureau by surprise last week. It asked the Senate Appropriations Committee to set aside $448 million in the next coronavirus relief package for a “timely” completion of the census.

The request did not define what “timely” meant, and legislation released Monday said only that the money would be used for nationwide census operations and data processing. But it comes as census workers and former officials say the White House and the Commerce Department, which oversees the Census Bureau, are asking how the bureau can compress its schedule to wrap up the count of households earlier than expected — perhaps by the end of September. The aim, they say, may be to speed up the delivery of key data for political reapportionment to the president by the end of December.

The administration has yet to announce a compressed schedule and may not find a way to do so. But the prospect already has alarmed an array of experts, who warned in recent days that an expedited census risks a deeply flawed count of the nation’s population. The census is constitutionally required to count all residents of the country every 10 years.

“There’s a lot of uncertainty, but one thing is absolutely sure: There will be egregious undercounts if the Census Bureau has to produce this data by December,” said Robert Santos, vice president of the Urban Institute and incoming president of the American Statistical Association.

Some, including former Census Bureau directors, raised the prospect that the final totals could be so skewed that a future Congress might order the bureau to do further work on the 2020 population data or even consider another census in five years, which federal law allows but which has never been conducted nationwide.

The numbers are enormously important. They are used to reapportion all 435 House seats and thousands of state and local districts, as well as divvy up trillions of dollars in federal grants and aid.

With White House approval, the bureau asked Congress for a four-month extension — to April 2021 — of the Dec. 31 statutory deadline for delivering to the president the population totals required to reapportion the House of Representatives.

But that plan now appears to be in flux. Census Bureau workers have been asked whether that Oct. 31 deadline for collecting data can be moved to September, giving them six or seven weeks to finish a count that was supposed to take 10 weeks.

The White House declined to address questions about its census plans.

MANDEL NGAN/GETTY-AFP In another census battle, demonstrators last year at the U.S. Supreme Court protest a plan to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census. The court blocked the question.