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The Trump Plan to Cook the Census Books

From adding a citizenship question to not tracking race and ethnicity, the administration wants to minimize Black and brown political power.

After the first Trump administration purposely broke the 2020 Census—the decennial population count that determines congressional representation, among other things—I implored the Biden administration to do away with Trump’s warped count and commission an accurate one. I said it should be unconscionable to spend 10 years relying on a census that purposely undercounted Black and brown voters, as it would make it even easier for Republicans to gerrymander away minority political representation.

The Biden administration, of course, did nothing to fix the problem, and Republicans have indeed done everything they can to erase minority representation through gerrymandering. Now Donald Trump is back, and his administration is taking another stab at ruining the Census. This time it’s not only trying to juice GOP representation in Congress but also trying to ensure massive changes in how federal resources are allocated.

Back during Trump’s first term, his administration did not get everything it wanted out of the 2020 Census. You might remember that, in 2019, Trump desperately tried to add a citizenship question to that Census but was blocked by the Supreme Court. Now that he has returned to power, his administration is trying to add a citizenship question to the 2030 Census—a question that will have two separate but related effects. The first is that it will deter some noncitizens from filling out the form, and the second is that the government will then exclude many of the noncitizens who do answer from the final count. The result: an artificially depressed population count in a number of states.

The fact that Trump is planning anything around the 2030 Census is mildly worrisome to me, given that Trump is supposed to be out of power by then. However, the decennial Census is a massive government undertaking, and mid-decade planning for the thing is not inherently abnormal.

Moreover, Trump’s attempt to radically change the Census just as the count was set to get started in 2019 is what scuttled his plan. Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the unanimous opinion blocking the addition of the citizenship question, arguing that the administration’s reason for adding the question was contrived, and thus the administration didn’t meet the criteria for amending the Census questionnaire. This time, Trump is starting early and doing what the court pretty much told him to do to get a second bite at the........

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