Greatest US head count nearly ready to start

ORLANDO, Fla. — With just a few months left before America starts taking its biggest-ever self-portrait, the U.S. Census Bureau is grappling with a host of concerns about the head count, including how to ensure that it is secure and accurate and the challenge of getting most people to answer questions online.

All of that is on top of the main attention-grabber of the 2020 census so far — a citizenship question that was nixed by the Supreme Court, dropped by the Trump administration, resuscitated briefly and then abandoned again.

Beginning early next year, residents from Utqiagvik, Alaska, the town formerly known as Barrow, to Key West, Florida, will be quizzed on their sex, age, race, the type of home they have and how they are related to everyone living with them.

At stake is the balance of political power in a deeply divided country, billions of dollars a year in federal funding and population data that will shape business decisions nationwide for years to come.

Costing as much as $15.6 billion, the once-a-decade census not only captures the United States at a given moment — in this case April 1, 2020, officially. But it is perhaps the only thing every U.S. household is legally required to participate in regardless of who lives there.

Counting some 330 million heads is the largest peacetime operation the federal government undertakes. The Census Bureau hires a half million workers, opens around 250 offices and mails out a multitude of forms in English and 12 other languages to more than 130 million households.

“The kind of scale we're talking about to count this nation is massive, massive, massive,” Democratic Rep. Darren Soto of Florida said recently.

A census has taken place in the U.S. every decade since 1790, and contentious legal fights about it are nothing new. But the Trump administration's attempt to add the citizenship question triggered lawsuits that carried the issue all the way to the Supreme Court.

Opponents of the question said it would have discouraged participation by minorities, primarily Hispanics, who tend to support Democrats. The Republican administration argued that the question would have helped enforce the Voting Rights Act, a rationale that seemed “contrived” to Chief Justice John Roberts in his majority opinion.

President Donald Trump later said the question was needed to help draw congressional districts, even though the Constitution mandates districts based on total population, not the number of citizens.

After t he administration abandoned the question, Trump directed federal agencies to compile the information in other ways. That ensured the controversy would continue and raised the possibility that it still might affect the count.

Census Bureau Director Steven Dillingham, a Trump appointee, acknowledged the challenge but vowed to conduct “the best census ever, one that is complete and accurate.”