Trump's Census Manipulation Has Come to an End

The Trump administration’s final attempt to sabotage the census thankfully died the week leading up to Biden's inauguration.  In its last days, the Trump's Justice Department admitted to a federal judge that the Census Bureau would not be able to release data on the number of undocumented immigrants living in each state before Trump's final day in office.   

As first reported by NPR's Hansi Lo Wang, Donald Trump intended to use this data for the apportionment of congressional seats among states.  This plan, if successful, would have stripped seats in the House of Representatives from states with large undocumented communities. Trump’s political appointees tried to rush out this data before the president’s term ended, but the task proved impossible.  

Trump spent much of his term rigging the census to maximize the political power of white rural voters at the expense of immigrants, racial minorities, and city dwellers.  He first sought to add a citizenship question, which would have produced a severe under-count of immigrants and Latinos. The Supreme Court blocked that question in 2018, finding that the administration lied  to the court about its purpose when it claimed that gathering citizenship information was necessary to enforce the Voting Rights Act. 

Trump then issued an order to have data on undocumented immigrants compiled using existing administrative records instead.  He later directed the Census Bureau to exclude these immigrants from the population count used to distribute congressional seats among states.  If successful, this plan would have  stripped seats, as well as votes in the Electoral College, from more diverse states like California.

Civil rights groups sued to block Trump’s directive, but the Supreme Court’s conservative majority allowed it to continue.  After the Census Bureau initially blew past the December 31 deadline for the apportionment data, its director—Steven Dillingham, a Trump appointee—then tried to rush out the information before January 20.  Dillingham  made the task the Bureau's number one priority, and deputy directors Nathaniel Cogley and Benjamin Overholt (both Trump appointees) pushed career employees to their limit in order to produce Trump’s report before the inauguration.

Whistleblowers at the Census Bureau revealed this last-minute scramble to Peggy E. Gustafson, the Commerce Department Inspector General.  In a scathing letter, Gustafson concluded that career employees had been given faulty data on undocumented residents and due to the compressed timeline, the employees had been forced to forgo standard data quality checks. One whistleblower called the work “statistically indefensible.” (Congressional Democrats reacted to the letter by calling for Dillingham’s resignation or termination.)

in response to Gustafson’s letter, Dillingham told the Census Bureau to halt work on the tabulation of undocumented immigrants, and the Justice Department bowed to the inevitable, telling a federal judge that the bureau would not “be in position to finalize or provide apportionment data until many weeks after January 20.”  The move was effectively an admission that Trump’s project was doomed to failure, and an acknowledgment that Biden would likely formally kill it within weeks.

Trump’s inability to manipulate the census is one of his most remarkable failures. Had Trump succeeded, he would have handed Republicans an unearned electoral advantage for the next 10 years. The chilling postscript on this episode is that the Supreme Court’s conservative justices seemed favorable to Trump's nativist overhaul of the Census process that would diminish representation for non-citizens.  When Justice Roberts rejected the citizenship question, he sent administration officials a message: lie better next time.