Advocacy groups demand resignation
A coalition of civil rights groups on Wednesday called for the resignation of U.S. Census Bureau Director Steven Dillingham after the bureau’s watchdog agency reported that bureau statisticians were being pressured to figure out who is in the U.S. illegally in the waning days of the Trump administration.
Dillingham was undermining the statistical agency’s standards for data quality to comply with an order from President Donald Trump that was “motivated by partisan objectives,” leaders of the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials, Asian Americans Advancing Justice and The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights said in a statement.
“We do not lightly come to the conclusion that he should resign,” the statement said.
Census Bureau directors have five-year terms and Dillingham’s tenure does not end until the end of the year.
The resignation demand came a day after the Office of Inspector General reported that two Trump appointees in top positions at the Census Bureau, Nathaniel Cogley and Benjamin Overholt, were driving the efforts to figure out the citizenship status of every U.S. resident as part of the 2020 census.
The appointments of Cogley and Overholt last year were criticized strongly by statisticians, academics and Democratic lawmakers, who worried they would politicize the once-a-decade census.
Dillingham has set a Friday deadline for bureau statisticians to provide him with a technical report on the effort, whistleblowers told the Office of Inspector General.
“Bureau officials are concerned that incomplete data could be misinterpreted, misused or otherwise tarnish the Bureau’s reputation,” said Inspector General Peggy Gustafson in the memo to Dillingham.
Gustafson’s memo asked Dillingham to answer what he intends to use the information for and why he was making it a top priority. The Census Bureau did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Trump two years ago ordered the Census Bureau to use administrative records to figure out who is in the country illegally after the Supreme Court blocked his administration’s effort to put a citizenship question on the 2020 census questionnaire. The statistical agency has not said publicly what method it’s utilizing to do that.
Information about the citizenship status of every U.S. resident could be used to implement another Trump order seeking to exclude people in the country illegally from the count used for divvying up congressional seats and Electoral College votes, as well as the annual distribution of $1.5 trillion in federal spending, among the states.
An influential GOP adviser had advocated excluding those in the country illegally from the apportionment process to favor Republicans and non-Hispanic whites.