Trump misses census data deadline set by law
The Trump administration missed a deadline for giving Congress numbers used for divvying up congressional seats amongthe states, and government attorneys said Monday that the figures would not be ready until early March, almost amonth later than previously disclosed.
President Donald Trump on Sunday let slip the target date for transmitting the apportionment numbers to Congress as the U.S. Census Bureau continued to work toward fixing data irregularities from its number-crunching efforts.
Under federal law, the president is required to hand over the numbers to Congress showing the number of people in each state within the first week of the start of Congress in the year following a once-a-decade head count of every U.S. resident. There are no penalties for missing the deadline.
The president’s tardiness stemmed from the Commerce Department, which oversees the Census Bureau, missing a yearend target date for giving the apportionment numbers to the president, due to the pandemic and irregularities that were discovered while crunching data from the 2020 census on a shortened schedule.
“The Census Bureau is committed to fixing all anomalies and errors that it finds in order to produce complete and accurate results,” said Deborah Stempowski, an assistant director at the Census Bureau, in a court filing last week.
The census not only decides how many congressional seats and Electoral College votes each state gets based on population, but it also determines the distribution of $1.5 trillion in federal funding each year.
The earliest date the apportionment numbers will be ready is March 6, nearly a month past the Feb. 9 date disclosed last week, as the Census Bureau fixes anomalies discovered during data processing, Department of Justice attorneys said Monday during a court hearing.
The Department of Justice is representing the Commerce Department and Census Bureau in a lawsuit filed by a coalition of municipalities and advocacy groups in federal court in San Jose, Calif.
If the March date holds, the Census Bureau will not finish processing the numbers until weeks after Trump leaves office Jan. 20, putting in jeopardy an unprecedented order by the president to exclude people in the country illegally from those figures.
President-elect Joe Biden opposes the order, which was inspired by an influential GOP adviser who wrote that excluding them from the apportionment process would favor Republicans and non-Hispanic whites.