Trump administration is cutting the US census short — why that matters

The US Census Bureau hasn’t offered a clear explanation for its decision this week to bring an early end to the decennial enumeration of the nation’s population, but the reason is clear enough: The Trump administration doesn’t want a complete count, as the law requires.

This is not a secret plot. President Donald Trump has been trying to whitewash the census since the moment he took office. First his administration tried to add a question about citizenship to try depress the response rate of noncitizens. As one longtime Republican strategist concluded in a 2015 analysis, excluding noncitizens from the census would “be advantageous to Republicans and non-Hispanic whites”. After the Supreme Court poured cold water on that plan last year, Trump directed the government last month not to count immigrants living in the country illegally for the purposes of reapportioning seats in the House of Representatives. (That’s almost certainly unconstitutional.)

The latest gambit is broader: Ending the crucial in-person canvass one month early will ensure a significant undercount of minorities, as well as rural populations and other groups. Even in the best of times, counting roughly 330 million people is a monumental task. In the midst of a pandemic, it becomes incalculably harder.

The bureau anticipated this back in April, during the first wave of the coronavirus, when it requested from Congress a four-month extension to deliver its data. Current federal law requires the data to be turned in by December 31; the extension would have run through April 2021, potentially handing the data to a Biden administration. As part of its request, the bureau said it would continue knocking on doors, trying to reach every person in the country, through the end of October.

The House of Representatives approved that request in May; the Senate has not acted on it. Instead of pressing harder, the census director, Steven Dillingham, said door-to-door data collection would end on September 30.

“We are committed to a complete and accurate 2020 census,” Dillingham said.

It’s hard to see how. Just last month, the census’ associate director, Albert Fontenot Jr, said, “we are past the window of being able to get those counts” by the end of the year.

Why does an accurate and complete census matter? Because it is the anchor of representative democracy. Based on this count, the US make some of its most consequential decisions as a society, from the states’ representation in Congress to the distribution of more than US$1.5 trillion in annual funding for a wide range of public programmes. Businesses rely on the data to plan investments. School districts rely on it to decide how many teachers they need.

The financial ramifications of any mistakes in the census count for state

and local governments are particularly significant. Research by Andrew Reamer, a professor at George Washington University, provides a partial picture of the impact of undercounting. For each person missed by the 2010 census, he calculates that in the 2015 fiscal year, that person’s state lost about US$1091 in federal funding for Medicaid and child welfare programmes.

To date, just under 63 per cent of American households have responded to the census. In normal years, census workers would knock

on as many doors as possible from the other 37 per cent of homes, many in poorer and rural areas of the country. The arrival of the pandemic, only weeks before the start of the count on April 1, disrupted those plans. The outbreak hasn’t abated, and will probably get worse when flu season begins. Add to that the many Americans who have been displaced by the virus and you have the ingredients for a major distortion in the count.

The president ought to do everything in his power to ameliorate

that distortion. Instead, Trump and his Republican allies have repeatedly tried to exacerbate it. By their calculations, the fewer people of colour and noncitizens who are counted, the better.

It’s true that people of colour, who are more likely to be poor or marginalised than white people, are less likely to be counted in the census, perhaps more so this year than in decades. But the irony is that a rush to finish the counting process could hurt Trump’s own voters, too.

That’s because the poorest states, which depend the most on federal funding, also tend to have lower census response rates. In West Virginia, federal funding from programmes tied to the census accounted for 17 per cent of economic activity in 2017, according to Reamer’s calculations. The state has one of the lowest census response rates.

And because so much federal funding is allocated to states based at least in part on census population estimates, an inaccurate census doesn’t just harm people in undercounted communities. It harms everyone who lives in the same state.

Whatever happens in the election, the effects of the census will be with the country for at least another decade — a legacy that will long outlive this administration.

Congress can intervene. The deadline for delivery of the final count needs to be extended to April 30, 2021, as the Census Bureau initially requested. That would force states to delay the process of drawing new legislative maps, and in some cases could make it impossible to meet deadlines written into state law. But the necessary adjustments are a small price to pay for 10 years of a fairer and more accurate democracy.