President Donald Trump on Thursday instructed the Commerce Department to have the Census Bureau start work on a new census that would exclude immigrants who are in the United States illegally from the head count which determines political power and federal spending.
The census will be based on “modern day facts and figures and, importantly, using the results and information gained from the Presidential Election of 2024,” the Republican president said on his social media platform.
Experts said it was unclear what exactly Trump was calling for, whether it was changes to the 2030 census or a mid-decade census, and, if so, whether it would be used for a mid-decade apportionment, which is the process of divvying up congressional seats among the states based on the population count.
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.
Any changes in conducting a U.S. census would require alterations to the Census Act and approval from Congress, which has oversight responsibilities, and there likely would be a fierce fight.
The federal law governing the census permits a mid-decade head count for things like distributing federal funding, but it can’t be used for apportionment or redistricting and must be done in a year ending in 5. Additionally, the 14th Amendment says that “the whole number of persons in each state” are to be counted for the numbers used for apportionment, and the Census Bureau has interpreted that to mean anybody residing in the United States regardless of legal status. Federal courts have repeatedly supported that interpretation, though the Supreme Court has blocked recent efforts to change that on procedural rather than legal grounds.
“He cannot unilaterally order a new census. The census is governed by law, not to mention the Constitution,” said Terri Ann Lowenthal, a former congressional staffer who consults on census 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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