Don’t debase the census

Meddling in the census fits into the Trump administration’s broader efforts to manipulate data and institutions to skew elections in his party’s favor.

By Wendy Weiser and Thomas Wolf

Lost in last month’s political maelstrom was President Donald Trump’s cryptic Truth Social post stating that he had instructed federal officials to make significant and immediate changes to the census. Amid the rapid deployment of federal troops to U.S. cities, the targeting of political opponents, and the threats to take control of elections, it’s tempting to dismiss changes to the census as unimportant. They are not. Meddling in the census fits into the Trump administration’s broader efforts to manipulate data and institutions to skew elections in his party’s favor.

Trump’s plans, in his words, involve the Commerce Department, which conducts the census through the Census Bureau, starting work “immediately” on a “new” census that would exclude “[p]eople who are in our Country illegally” and include “results and information … from the Presidential Election of 2024.” If the department follows these instructions by creating a new census mid-decade and adopting new rules for whom to count, that would be both dangerous and illegal.

The census is a constitutionally required, once-a-decade count of everyone living in the United States. Census numbers are used to allocate political representation through apportionment—the process of divvying up congressional seats among the states—and redistricting—the process of drawing districts for elections. Census data is also used to distribute government resources—$2.1 trillion dollars in federal funds for fiscal 2021, for example. That funding goes to building and maintaining hospitals, roads, schools, and more. Businesses, local governments, public health officials, and many others rely on census data to make decisions. Because so much depends on its accuracy, the census has long been a non-partisan project run by data specialists tasked with producing the most accurate numbers possible.

The proposed census shake-up threatens to destabilize this process for partisan political gain.

The president’s census announcement came right after he prompted a nationwide partisan gerrymandering campaign. Since July, he and his allies have reportedly pushed Republican state legislators around the country to redraw congressional maps to maximize the number of seats their party can win in the 2026 midterm elections. Redistricting is typically done only once: after the results of the census are released. A new census could create an excuse for more mid-decade partisan gerrymandering — like what just happened in Texas, where lawmakers, at the urging of the president, approved new maps more favorable to Republicans for the 2026 midterms. And if the numbers are distorted in a manner favorable to the president’s party, that could enable politicians to undertake even more aggressive partisan manipulation of political lines. Call this the census two-step: first, manipulate the census numbers; then, get partisan allies to manipulate the maps.

We know this playbook because Trump tried and failed to exploit the census along these lines last time he was in office. During his first administration, he tried to add a citizenship question (presumably to subtract noncitizens from the count), tried to rush the count, and tried to order the bureau to provide him “information” about “illegal aliens” so as to exclude those immigrants from the numbers used for apportionment. Those efforts were either thwarted by the courts or—in the case of Trump’s order to the bureau—fell apart in the middle of litigation because time ran out.

Meddling in the census won’t just debase the integrity of our elections, though. It will also debase core data on which our economy and government depend.

A rushed census would guarantee a flawed count. Counting everyone in a country this large and diverse requires years of preparation. Census mailers and online forms only captured 67 percent of households in 2020—a far cry from the constitutionally mandated count of the total population living in the country. In 2020, the Census Bureau needed $13.7 billion, over a decade of planning, and 373,784 people knocking on doors to count 331.4 million people.

Adding questions to determine who is “legally” in the country would further undermine data accuracy and incur additional costs. The bureau’s own studies from the past decade estimated that adding a citizenship question would discourage 2.1 million households and 6.5 million people from responding to the census, increasing the cost by at least $91.2 million. There is also no current data set that would allow the bureau to reliably figure out the citizenship of everyone in the country.

This proposed census plan isn’t just a practical disaster waiting to happen. It’s also illegal.

First and foremost, the president has no constitutional authority over the census—and he doesn’t have the power to rewrite the laws to give himself that authority. The Constitution puts Congress in charge of the census, and Congress has passed federal laws governing how it must be executed—with no role for the president other than transmitting the numbers and the corresponding apportionment results to Congress when the count is done.

These laws clearly provide that no one—not the president, the Commerce secretary, or the Census Bureau—can create new numbers for apportionment or redistricting in between decennial censuses. The census must be held in the “zero year” each decade and be completed within nine months. The last census was in 2020. That means the next must be in 2030. The only mid-decade updates to census numbers allowed under federal law, for example, to assess eligibility for federal benefits, were required to be started in April 2025. Even so, Congress expressly barred these mid-decade numbers from being used for redistricting or apportionment. The administration can’t use census updates as a backdoor to gerrymander the country.

What’s more, the Constitution requires the census to count “the whole number of persons in each State”—a command that has been understood since the first census in 1790 to require a count of all people residing in the country on Census Day, regardless of citizenship status. A “citizens-only” headcount would violate this clear constitutional command.

Just because this is illegal doesn’t mean the administration won’t try it. And if it succeeds, it would mark an unprecedented politicization of the census—with all of the real harms to democracy, government, and public welfare that come with it. We must ensure the administration doesn’t succeed where it failed last time.

Wendy Weiser is vice president for democracy at the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU Law School. She oversees the center’s work on voting rights and elections, redistricting and representation, federal reform, abuse of power, and the courts. Thomas Wolf is the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU Law’s director of democracy initiatives. Wolf leads major constitutional litigation and jurisprudence projects for the Democracy Program. He is the founder of the Historians Council on the Constitution and the Brennan Center’s census project.

---