Who counts, and who doesn’t?
That’s the question the Trump administration is trying to settle, in a way that could skew the 2020 Census — and alter American politics for the next decade.
One thing appears certain: after the end of September, census-takers won’t be counting anyone.
The Census Bureau announced Monday night that it is abandoning a plan to extend the deadline for submission of census surveys from Sept. 30 to Oct. 31, due to the Covid-19 pandemic.
This includes field data collection — census-takers going door-to-door to get head-counts of every household that has failed to respond otherwise — which will shut down at the end of September, even though the time-consuming process was delayed and has hardly begun.
Many advocates for civil rights and immigrants are outraged.
“This new deadline allows Trump to cheat hard-to-count communities of color out of the resources needed for everything from health care and education to housing and transportation for the next 10 years,” said Asian Americans Advancing Justice.
The administration “is doing everything it can to sabotage the 2020 Census so that it reflects an inaccurate and less diverse portrait of America,” writes Vanita Gupta of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, in a Washington Post op-ed, warning that it will “all but guarantee a massive undercount,”
“In order to obtain as many responses as possible by [Sept. 30], the bureau will be hiring additional census takers and provide incentives for those who work the maximum hours possible,” reports the LA Times on MSN.
But even without the pandemic, they’d face a daunting task.
As of early August, only 63% of the nation’s estimated 121 million households have responded to the census — leaving nearly 4 in 10 uncounted, many in hard-to-reach areas.
The Census “now has less than two months left to try to reach people of color, immigrants, renters, rural residents and other members of historically undercounted groups who are not likely to fill out a census form on their own,” writes Hansi Lo Wang on NPR.
Wang notes that there is still “a window for lawmakers to … give the bureau more time,” but that only Democrats appear to support the idea.
The U.S. Constitution requires that every 10 years, the census determine the “whole number of persons” living in the United States (that is, not just citizens), a number that determines how many Representatives each state will have in Congress for the following decade.
The Census Bureau remains committed “to conduct a complete count, provide accurate apportionment data, and protect the health and safety of the public and our workforce,” agency director Steven Dillingham, a Trump appointee, said in a statement.
“But the truncated timeline is likely to fuel fresh scrutiny about the accuracy of the bureau’s US population count that has already been disrupted by the ongoing coronavirus pandemic,” CNN says.
Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, who runs the bureau, got permission from Congress in April for 4-month extensions of the deadlines for completing the count and submitting redistricting data, due to the pandemic. The Census Bureau is part of the Commerce Department.
“But the administration walked away from that plan, apparently around the same time that President Trump was unveiling a directive last month that undocumented immigrants be excluded from the apportionment data,” says Talking Points Memo.
It’s unclear how any president could make such a directive stick, given the Constitutional requirement to count every “person” in the country.
