Trump’s Attempts to Control the Census: Your Questions Answered

The Trump administration plans to upend the census. They’re proposing to exclude noncitizens from the count that determines the distribution of congressional seats, a move that would subtract political power from regions with large immigrant populations. They also want to stop collecting data about race, ethnicity, and sexual orientation. 

Their efforts are a stark reminder of how much the census shapes our politics. Its results guide redistricting, apportion congressional districts, and steer government funding—processes that are vulnerable to decisions made by public officials on how to collect and organize the data.

Last month, we invited Bolts readers to send us questions about the census and the latest proposals to transform it. 

Then, we shared many of those questions with danah boyd, an ethnographer and professor of communication who wrote a new book on the census, “Data Are Made, Not Found.” boyd interviewed hundreds of civil servants who worked on the 2020 census as they dealt with major obstacles including budget constraints and the COVID-19 pandemic.

The 2020 census proved challenging enough, but boyd shares her worries about what lies ahead. “Right now, the Census Bureau is facing the destruction of long-standing norms, the departure of people with sizable institutional knowledge, micromanaging of the scientific method, and egregious partisan dictates,” she told Bolts. 

She explains why she thinks it’s risky for the Census Bureau to start asking people about their citizenship, and what would be lost if it stops collecting data about race. And she lays out why it might be hard to roll back some of the decisions the Trump administration is making right now—unless Congress intervenes soon.

boyd answers 10 questions here. Select the one you are most interested in from the list below, or keep scrolling to explore them all.

What’s the history of who gets counted in the census? 

How have past presidents interfered with the census? 

Why does Trump want to ask about citizenship?

If the census asked about citizenship, how would that be enforced? 

Were people afraid to take the census in 2020?

Did census workers face attacks and aggression? 

Are people growing less likely to answer such surveys?

What are your main fears about the next census? 

Why does the census track race? 

Will there be time in 2029 to change the census?

This is the latest in our “Ask Bolts” series, in which we answer questions from our readers.

Is the census based on the whims of the current administration or is it intended to count all people living in the country as of a particular date? I always thought all residents were supposed to be counted, based on my mom’s experience as a census worker in 1960. — Flicker, from Oregon

In the United States, the census is the backbone of our representative democracy. After establishing the existence of a Congress, the Constitution explains in Article 1, Section 2 that representatives shall be apportioned among the states “according to their respective Numbers” which are to be enumerated by processes set forth by Congress. The clause contains a horrific stain on our country’s history because non-“free” persons are to only be counted as three-fifths of a person; this was corrected by the Fourteenth Amendment. But it is also clear that everyone is to be counted. And that Congress is responsible for the census.

Since the first census in 1790, all people who are residents of the United States have been counted, regardless of where they are born or if they were formally naturalized. In modern times, the “residence rules” for the census have excluded people who are tourists visiting the U.S. or diplomats from other countries, but they have never excluded people who call the U.S. their home. The pressure to exclude non-citizens from apportionment is a partisan move that is decades in the making, rooted deeply in a xenophobic and isolationist history.

For a good overall history of the census, I highly recommend Margo Anderson’s “The American Census.”

Since there are and have always been political implications, have presidents interfered in the past by “ordering” the Census Bureau to count or not count people? — JCreek, from California | How have particular administrations tried to limit or manipulate representation of people of color? — Anonymous, from Los Angeles 

The Constitution tasks Congress with running the census. After the 1920 census, Southern Democrats were afraid that they were going to lose political power once reapportionment happened so they refused to reapportion, arguing that they could only do so once they figured out the “right” math. By 1929, Congress still hadn’t reapportioned the House (although Southern Democrats had managed to pass a lot of anti-immigration laws in an effort to reduce their loss of power). Frustrated, a group of senators pushed through the “Permanent Reapportionment Act of 1929.” 

One of the weird artifacts of this law is that Congress instructed the president to convert census data into seats in the House of Representatives out of fear that political infighting would prevent Congress from doing its job. The idea was that the president wouldn’t mess with reapportionment like Congress had. And until President Trump tried to mess with this process in the 2020 census, no president had interfered at this level. 

The pressure to not count non-citizens is not actually new. John Tanton pushed to prevent the Census Bureau from counting non-citizens decades ago. His legal efforts failed; the courts repeatedly ruled that the census must count everyone. But that didn’t stop his network of people from continuing to try. This is the backstory to President Trump’s efforts. 

Why would Trump and his allies want to ask about citizenship on the census? What could they stand to gain? — Bolts staff

The first Trump administration tried but failed to introduce a citizenship question in the 2020 decennial census. Keep in mind that citizenship is already asked about a sample of the population for the American Community Survey (ACS); the goal was to collect this data about the entire population, not just those who responded to the ACS. As the story unfolded, three motivations emerged. The publicly stated reason by the Trump administration was that they needed this data to enforce the Voting Rights Act (VRA). That’s peculiar because 1) the VRA has been enforced for decades without having this data; 2) VRA compliance has long been done using the ACS; and 3) the Trump administration was opposed to the VRA. 

Another motivation was clearly the result of a court case known as Evenwel v. Abbott, where the Supreme Court gave states the opportunity to draw districts using citizenship data. Some redistricters argued that having this about the whole population would make for more effective redistricting than using just the data collected by the ACS. 

A third motivation was only presumed but not explicitly known until late in the first Trump administration. In short, President Trump wanted to subtract certain classes of non-citizens from the apportionment base before turning the results over to Congress. The administration made this goal explicit late in 2020, but it was not implemented after President Trump lost his bid for re-election.

The second Trump administration is returning to the citizenship question. It is both requiring the question and planning to simply not collect data about certain non-citizens, thereby undermining the population count at the counting stage and making it impossible to repair down the line. We are bound to see significant legal challenges to this. 

Keep in mind that, even if Congress did pass a law ordering the bureau not to count non-citizens, the Supreme Court would have to decide if excluding non-citizens from the apportionment base violates Article 1, Section 2 of the Constitution. Most legal scholars (and previous court rulings like Franklin v. Massachusetts) argue it does. But this Supreme Court has already upended precedent in peculiar ways, so it is unclear how they would rule. 

With this citizenship question, would they expect enumerators to confirm citizenship? Will people really dig out their passports and birth certificates to show an enumerator? — JCreek, from California

People do lie on the census, intentionally and inadvertently. They lie about every variable, regardless of how significant it is. I’m always humored by how, since at least 1880, a sizable enough number of people lie about their age that, if the Census Bureau were to publish age data as collected, you’d get insane heaps around ages ending in ‘0’ and ‘5.’ 

Data are not published as collected; they are made. And there are many different ways to address errors in the collected data, including triangulating with other sources like administrative data. So even if people “lied” about their citizenship status, data from Homeland Security might be used to “fix” the data. However, I’m putting these words in quotations because Homeland Security does not always have more accurate data, especially about newly naturalized citizens. The bureau also knows that the administrative data that they get often have a delay on them; people are citizens but the records say that they are not-yet citizens. Our data infrastructure is messier than people realize.

The last census didn’t actually ask about citizenship; but there was so much talk of it, and people were afraid. Did census employees tell you if the people they met were afraid to talk to them? — Clara, from Washington, D.C.

In my mind, what makes the proposal to ask about citizenship terrifying is not that people will “lie,” but that a large number of people will avoid the census taker to begin with. They won’t fill out the forms, even if they are citizens, because members of their household aren’t. They won’t answer the door when the enumerators knock. The potential for an undercount is significant. 

And the Census Bureau’s researchers fully understand this, which is why they’ve been opposed to this question since it was first proposed. They don’t want to undercount people. But politicians might find that advantageous.

In fact, the Census Bureau conducted lots of internal research about the citizenship question in advance of the 2020 census; in short, the question reduces participation due to fear and lack of trust.

Other factors could also contribute to census avoidance. For example, while ICE raids predate the second Trump administration, they are certainly going to significantly affect how people interpret the enumerators knocking on their door. 

This suggests that fear and distrust will be a big factor in 2030. And it’s not clear to me whether or not the Census Bureau has the resources to evaluate how fear is going to influence the 2030 census. And keep in mind that thousands of civil servants have been let go and hiring has been frozen, so there are many ways in which we will be blinkered going into the 2030 census.

And while the citizenship question is front and center right now, it’s important to recognize that the harder part of the 2020 census was that it unfolded during the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic. As a result, many people were afraid to talk with enumerators. They were afraid of government officials; they were afraid of strangers; but they were also just afraid that another human might spread a disease. To my knowledge, the bureau did not try to disentangle these fears. Enumerators wore masks and did their best to assure people that they were legitimate.

Some census workers may have reported aggression toward them. Is that common and how would that have impacted the overall process? — @esmewrites, on Bluesky

Sadly, this is more common than most people realize. Early on, when I was talking with a census official about why it was so hard to keep enumerators from quitting given that the pay was significantly above minimum wage, I got a one-word answer: dogs. Apparently, getting bitten by a dog is an occupational hazard for Amazon workers, USPS workers, and census workers. I talked with multiple enumerators who quit after the first, second, or third dog bite. 

I also talked to one who seemed to be invincible, having been bitten by more dogs than he could remember. That doesn’t make it any less disturbing.

Enumerators encounter all sorts of unexpected and unpleasant situations. People coming to their door naked, with a shotgun, or with a stream of hateful words. But enumerators also encounter the best side of Americans. Enumerators told me stories of getting to know their neighbors, being able to help an elderly resident, and being able to create connective tissue in their towns. 

The Census Bureau’s operational plan presumes that a shockingly high number of enumerators will quit. During training, bureau officials try to prepare enumerators for what the work is like, but they also know that no matter what they say, many people won’t know if it’s for them until they try it out. No amount of roleplay or training videos prepares people for what happens when they face someone who means them harm. The Census Bureau also works hard to identify the enumerators who seem invincible. I met one who had no problem dropping into towns in the middle of wildfires or convincing someone to respond even as a gun was pointed at his face. These special enumerators are deployed to the hardest cases.

We know that it’s so much harder to poll people these days. I’m curious if it has become harder for the census to reach people for the American Community Survey, and what implications that might have for its accuracy. — Aaron Mendelson, a journalist who has extensively written on issues linked to redistricting and challenges of data gathering.

In the United States, the public is legally required to complete the census. And that includes the American Community Survey, which was once the “long form” that was given to only a portion of the American public during a census and is now a rolling sample-based survey. 

And now the asterisks come in. Not everyone follows the law and the Census Bureau is not keen on using law enforcement to force compliance. So the bureau begs and pleads and sends notices, but it also knows that there are gaps. And so it does a lot of methodological work to leverage external data sources and figure out how to effectively re-weight the responses to make the best data possible, knowing full well that it would be better off if everyone just participated. The bureau also does its best to document the total measurement error and other limitations to its approach, although a lot of this is in the footnotes and methodological documentation that most data users ignore. 

A new asterisk has entered the playing field. In some of its internal materials, the Trump administration has stated that, going forward, the ACS will be optional and voluntary. If they go through with that, this is going to create a whole new headache for the bureau. 

This is definitely a ‘wait and see, but be prepared’ kind of situation. And it’s one where Congress hasn’t been tremendously helpful. Many electeds echo earlier politicians who opposed putting many questions on the 1790 census because “gratifying an idle curiosity” would be “a waste of trouble and supplying materials for idle people to make a book.”

What are your main fears over what Trump’s team could change in the next census? How could they hurt the census? — Jenna, from Pennsylvania

My main fear is the loss of legitimacy. By nearly all scientific and statistical measures, the quality of data produced in the 2020 census was better than any census conducted in the 19th or 20th centuries (and the first census in 1790). We can quibble over how it compares to the censuses in 2000 and 2010, but those censuses didn’t have to reckon with a global pandemic. And, yet, many people are absolutely convinced that the data were crap. Why? And what does this say about the data that we used for centuries? 

The legitimacy of a census is not something that is scientifically derived; it is rooted in our collective belief that these data are good enough for the purposes set forth by the Constitution. But good enough is socially constructed, rooted in the social fabric and collective imaginary. 

Right now, the Census Bureau is facing the destruction of long-standing norms, the departure of people with sizable institutional knowledge, micromanaging of the scientific method, and egregious partisan dictates. These can materially harm the bureau’s ability to do its job, for sure. But even if the bureaucrats manage to pull off “the impossible,” I’m worried that no one will believe them or the data that they produce.

Why do they need to break down the population by race? When I worked on the Census in 2010 I felt it was inappropriate to ask those questions since we’re all supposed to be equal before the law. — @karakoy, on X 

This is an interesting byproduct of legislative choices made in the middle of the 20th century. Starting in the 1960s, Congress passed numerous civil rights laws that were designed to address discrimination in the U.S. Many of these laws were anchored to the race categories collected by the census, including the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and the Equal Employment Opportunity Act of 1972. But the most important and relevant law is the Voting Rights Act (VRA) of 1965. In an era of Jim Crow, one of the ways that states were disenfranchising Black communities was to create hurdles for Black residents to vote. Another way was to draw Congressional districts that would make it impossible for the candidate that Black voters desired to ever obtain a majority. The VRA outlawed literacy tests and other barriers to voting, but it also ordered the states to draw districts that would allow minorities to have access to a majority voting district if such a map was possible.

If regulators and courts don’t have trustworthy data about race in the U.S., it’s not possible to uphold the anti-discrimination laws that depend on these data. This is where the census data comes in. These data are used to ensure that minority populations cannot be systematically disenfranchised by law. 

Of course, if you don’t like these laws, one way of enacting “policymaking by other means” is to dismantle the data upon which they depend. This is why people are so outraged about what’s happening. While we can have reasonable conversations about how to best understand the demographics of a given population, what’s at stake here is the viability of anti-discrimination laws that are anchored to these data. 

For a fascinating history of the intersection of race and the census, I highly recommend Cristina Mora’s “Making Hispanics,” Melissa Nobles’ “Shades of Citizenship,” and Ken Prewitt’s “What is ‘Your’ Race?” 

Is there time to fix the census starting in January 2029? — @tacramp, on Bluesky

No. The time is now. 

Each decade, the Census Bureau updates its procedures from the previous decades. In years ending in 6 (e.g. 2026, as in now!), the key operational plans and residence rules are announced, and Congress has the power to reject the proposals and demand something else. In years ending in 7, the topics of the questions are announced. Congress could object and order the bureau to address different questions. In years ending in 8, the final questions for the census are announced. Once again, Congress could take action. But by January of years ending in 9, key operations are underway, printing has begun, and the major systems have been built and tested. 

So every key component of the 2030 census will be in full production and rollout by January 2029. This is why Congress must stop abdicating its responsibility and ensure that the Constitution is upheld and the people are counted. The big question in all of this is, will this Congress take action? And, more importantly, will the Congress that’s seated after this upcoming election take action?