On Thursday, President Donald Trump directed the Commerce Department to initiate a new census project with the Census Bureau that would omit immigrants residing in the United States illegally from the population count. This count is crucial for determining political representation and federal funding distribution.
Trump mentioned on his social media platform that this upcoming census would rely on “current facts and figures, and notably, the insights and information obtained from the 2024 Presidential Election,” according to the Republican leader.
Experts remain uncertain about the specifics of Trump’s proposal, whether it implies modifications to the 2030 census or a separate mid-decade census, and whether such a count would impact the mid-decade apportionment, the process of allocating congressional seats according to population size.
Here’s some answers to questions Thursday’s post raises:
Can Trump do this?
It would be extremely difficult to conduct a mid-decade census, if not impossible, according to experts.
Implementing changes to the U.S. census methodology would necessitate adjustments to the Census Act and would require the approval of Congress, which oversees such procedures, and it is anticipated that this would lead to significant contention.
Federal law permits conducting a mid-decade census for purposes such as federal funding allocation, but it is prohibited from being used for apportionment or redistricting, and must occur in years ending with a five. Furthermore, the 14th Amendment mandates that “the whole number of persons in each state” must be included for apportionment purposes. The Census Bureau has consistently interpreted this to include all residents, regardless of legal status, a position that has been upheld repeatedly by federal courts. The Supreme Court has blocked attempts to modify this interpretation, though these actions were based on procedural grounds rather than legal principles.
“He cannot unilaterally initiate a new census. The census process is dictated by law, and also by the Constitution,” stated Terri Ann Lowenthal, a former congressional staff member and consultant on census-related issues.
Then there is the question of logistics. The once-a-decade census is the biggest non-military undertaking by the federal government, utilizing a temporary workforce of hundreds of thousands of census takers. It can take as much as 10 years of planning.
“This isn’t something that you can do overnight,” said New York Law professor Jeffrey Wice, a census and redistricting expert. “To get all the pieces put together, it would be such a tremendous challenge, if not impossible.”
Has this ever been done before?
A mid-decade census has never been conducted before.
In the 1970s, there was interest in developing data from the middle of the decade for more accurate and continuous information about American life, and a mid-decade census was considered. But the funding from Congress never came through, said Margo Anderson, a professor emerita at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee who has written extensively on the history of the census.
Decades later, those wishes for continuous data would develop into the American Community Survey, the annual survey of American life based on responses from 3.5 million households.
In his first term, President Donald Trump, a Republican, unsuccessfully tried to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census form and signed orders which would have excluded people in the U.S. illegally from the apportionment figures and mandate the collection of citizenship data through administrative records.
The attempt was blocked by the Supreme Court, and both orders were rescinded when Democratic President Joe Biden arrived at the White House in January 2021, before the 2020 census figures were released by Census Bureau.
Any attempt at a repeat would guarantee legal challenges.
“The census isn’t just a head count. It is meant to reflect America as it is – not as some would prefer it to be — and determines how critical resources are allocated,” ACLU Voting Rights project director Sophia Lin Lakin said in a statement. “Nobody should be erased from it. We won’t hesitate to go back to court to protect representation for all communities.”
What is a census used for?
Besides being used to divvy up congressional seats among the states and redraw political districts, the numbers derived from the once-a-decade census are used to guide the distribution of $2.8 trillion in annual government spending.
The federal funding is distributed to state and local governments, nonprofits, businesses and households, paying for health care, education, school lunch programs, child care, food assistance programs and highway construction, among other things.
Why is Trump doing this?
A Republican redistricting expert had written that using citizen voting-age population instead of the total population for the purpose of redrawing congressional and legislative districts could be advantageous to Republicans and non-Hispanic whites.
Critics believe the writings of Republican redistricting expert Tom Hofeller inspired the first Trump administration’s attempt at restricting the apportionment count and guided legislation introduced this year by Republican lawmakers to add a citizenship question to the 2030 census questionnaire. Trump has been open about his intent to increase the number of Republican seats in Congress and maintain the GOP majority in next year’s midterm elections.
Even though redistricting typically occurs once every 10 years following the census, Trump is pressuring Republicans in Texas to redistrict again, claiming they are “entitled” to five additional Republican seats. Trump’s team is also engaged in similar redistricting discussions in other GOP-controlled states, including Missouri and Indiana.
Some critics see the effort as part of Trump’s wider effort to control the federal statistical system, which has been considered the world’s gold standard.
Last Friday, Trump fired the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Erika McEntarfer, after standard revisions to the monthly jobs report showed that employers added 258,000 fewer jobs than previously reported in May and June. The revisions suggested that hiring has severely weakened under Trump, undermining his claims of an economic boom.
“Trump is basically destroying the federal statistical system,” Anderson said. “He wants numbers that support his political accomplishments, such as he sees them.”
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