Senate confirms census chief
WASHINGTON» The Senate on Thursday confirmed Robert Santos as head of the Census Bureau, making him the first person of color to serve as permanent director of the agency that counts the U.S. population, balances the number of electors to the Electoral College and tracks changes to demographics and wealth in the country.
The 58-35 vote to fill the position with a permanent director helped bring closure to a tumultuous period in which the previous director resigned out of concern that the agency had become a political weapon under the Trump administration.
In January, the former director, Steven Dillingham, left the job, citing concerns that the Trump administration’s threats to deport immigrants living in the country illegally had a chilling effect on survey response, undermining accurate population counts during the 2020 census. Dillingham’s term had been set to expire in December.
The bureau, which traditionally has played a largely apolitical role as a data collection body, also became a political target because of its role in redistricting. Under President Donald Trump, the bureau was ordered to tally unauthorized immigrants in what Democratic strategists saw as an effort to strip immigrants from the population count used to allocate House seats.
The Trump administration also tried to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census.
That provision was blocked by the Supreme Court in 2019 and abandoned by the Trump administration as time ran short to add the question to survey forms.
Many see the nomination of a Latino to head the bureau as symbolic of a reversal in course under the Biden administration.
“I think a lot of the controversy in 2020 and ongoing has been about people of color or immigrants, or who’s counted, who’s in, who’s out and those kinds of issues perennially come up,” said Carl Tobias, a law professor at the University of Richmond in Virginia. “So I think it’s valuable to have somebody who is a person of color in that position.”
Santos is also a prominent statistician who drew support from a number of Republicans in a hearing before the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee in August, including Sens. Mitt Romney of Utah, Rob Portman of Ohio and Ron Johnson of Wisconsin. Romney and Portman were among the 10 Republican senators who joined 48 Democrats to confirm Santos.
Santos serves as vice
president and chief methodologist at the Urban Institute in Washington and has worked extensively in survey sampling, studying outreach to unauthorized immigrants, refugees and other disadvantaged populations.
Santos will step in to oversee a department that has been severely hampered in its efforts by the pandemic, which forced the 2020 census to be conducted with a host of unfamiliar challenges, including mail delays and novel difficulties reaching people by phone or in person. He will be tasked with managing these challenges through his five-year term, which ends in 2026.