Repairing the US Census

New legislation can protect the Census Bureau from the political poison that was injected by the Trump Administration, but the damage to the 2020 Census has already been done

US Census workers in New York City on Sept. 24, 2020. (Photo by Noam Galai/Getty Images)

While the January 6 Select Committee appropriately grabbed the spotlight for its primetime hearing last Thursday, you might have missed findings released the day before by another House committee detailing corruption and criminality of the Trump Administration. This was from the House Committee on Oversight and Reform that has been investigating the illegal effort to add a citizenship question to the 2020 Census to gain political advantage—and it provides yet another reminder of the continuing consequences of a White House hostile to the Constitution, to immigrants and other people of color, as well as to the truth.

You might recall that, in March 2018, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross announced his decision to add a citizenship question to the 2020 Census—in order, he said, to obtain data that would safeguard voter rights by determining who is and who isn’t eligible to vote. The notion was that this would help ensure that the overall vote would not be diluted by illegal voters.

Yet while career staff at the Censure bureau warned that a citizenship question would likely “depress response rates, especially from immigrants,” Ross ignored them and claimed in a department memo that “neither the Census Bureau nor the concerned stakeholders could document that the response rate would in fact decline materially.”

It’s not hard to see what Ross and his boss had in mind. The Constitution explicitly states (Article I, sec. 2, clause 3) that a census or “actual Enumeration” should be made every 10 years in order to apportion seats in the House of Representatives. This requires a count of every person regardless of their citizenship status. Moreover, the 14th Amendment unambiguously asserts that “representatives shall be apportioned among the several states according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each state, excluding Indians not taxed.”

And even though in 2019 the Supreme Court ruled against the Trump administration’s efforts to include the citizenship question by calling its reasoning “contrived,” the attempt had succeeded in spreading fear within immigrant communities. And Trump wasn’t done: In July 2020, Trump signed a presidential memo ordering “the exclusion of illegal aliens from the apportionment base.”

One of President Biden’s first executive actions after he was sworn in on Jan. 20, 2021, was to reverse that unconstitutional policy, which not only would provide a false count of the total population for apportioning House seats, but also misrepresent the basis for the federal government’s distribution of an estimated $1.5 trillion to states and localities for everything from health care and education, to housing, transportation and other critical public services

It wasn’t until Jan. 6 this year when the Department of Commerce and Department of Justice finally released key documents that were withheld by the Trump administration, following the settlement of a lawsuit. Rep. Carolyn Maloney, chairwoman of the Committee on Oversight and Reform, clearly indicated what her committee faced:

“For years, the Trump administration delayed and obstructed the Oversight Committee’s investigation into the true reason for adding a citizenship question to the 2020 Census, even after the Supreme Court ruled the administration’s efforts were illegal. Today’s Committee memo pulls back the curtain on this shameful conduct and shows clearly how the Trump administration secretly tried to manipulate the census for political gain while lying to the public and Congress about their goals.”

Among the findings: Contrary to his Congressional testimony, documents show that Wilbur Ross’ main goal was to influence the apportioning of House seats. In addition, early memos from legal counsel warned that adding the citizenship question likely violated the Constitution.

Two weeks ago, Rep. Maloney introduced the Ensuring a Fair and Accurate Census Act to combat this kind of political poison and protect the independence of the Census Bureau. “The census is a foundation of American democracy, and it must be protected from partisan interference,” she said. “The American people saw firsthand how the Trump Administration tried to weaponize the Census Bureau to tip the scales in favor of one political party.”

Meanwhile, unsurprisingly, the Census Bureau has acknowledged that the 2020 Census undercounted Latinos, Native Americans living on reservations and Blacks—with the net undercount rate of Latinos (4.99 percent) particularly off-kilter. That undercount was more than triple the 1.54 percent undercount in 2010.

The consequences for many communities—and particularly the growing population of Latino families—are drastic. “Yeah, it’s not just about losing members of Congress from one state to another,” California Rep. Tony Cárdenas told Politico. “An undercount means that there’s less money for the kids in your neighborhood, there’s less money coming your way for the seniors who need support in your neighborhood.”

Congress has plenty of more work to pass legislation that will help protect the independence of government agencies from future elected leaders hell-bent on politicizing them for their partisan advantage. But we can be sure that the consequences of the Trump-era poison will continue to spread.

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