After Census Bureau announces early end to count, fears of skewed tally rise

WASHINGTON

With the Trump administration’s decision to end the 2020 Census count four weeks early, the Census Bureau now has to accomplish what officials have said it cannot do: accurately count the nation’s hardestto-reach residents — nearly 4 of every 10 households — in just six weeks.

On Tuesday, four former directors of the Census Bureau issued a statement warning that an earlier deadline would “result in seriously incomplete enumerations in many areas” and urged the administration to restore the lost weeks.

The Census Bureau, which had earlier set an April 2021 deadline because of the coronavirus pandemic, said the change was needed to meet a federal deadline to get the numbers to President Donald Trump by the end of the year. But Democratic lawmakers said the change reflected an attempt to undercount groups that tend to support their party.

Federal law requires the bureau to send population totals to the president by Dec. 31 of every census year. But the pandemic forced census officials in April to rewrite that timeline, pushing delivery of population totals to April 2021. The House approved the new deadline in May, but the Republican-controlled Senate has not followed suit, apparently at Trump’s behest.

So far this year, nearly 63% of households have voluntarily completed census surveys. The bureau this year has a considerably larger number of households to track down and count — 60 million, compared with 47 million in 2010.

The schedule change also compresses the time left for tallying other groups, including homeless people and residents of nursing homes and dormitories.