How the Census Bureau Stood Up to Donald Trump’s
Meddling
By Emily Bazelon and Michael Wines
Ms. Bazelon is a staff writer at The Times
Magazine. Mr. Wines is a national correspondent for the paper who writes about
voting and other election-related issues.
Aug. 12, 2021, 2:57 p.m. ET
WASHINGTON — There were 10 days left in
the Trump presidency. And John Abowd and Tori Velkoff had a decision to make.
Six months earlier, in July 2020,
President Donald Trump had ordered the Census
Bureau, where they were senior officials, to produce a count of every
unauthorized immigrant in the nation, separate from the 2020 census count that
was well underway. The Trump administration’s goal was to strip those
immigrants from the population count used to divvy up House seats among the
states.
The move promised to benefit
Republicans by sapping electoral strength from Democratic-leaning areas and
handing more voting power to older, white and most likely more conservative
populations.
Mr. Abowd, the
bureau’s chief scientist, and Ms. Velkoff, its chief demographer, were
obligated by law to carry out the president’s orders. They’d assigned some of
their top experts to produce an immigrant count from billions of government
records. Mr. Trump had also inserted four political
appointees into the bureau’s top ranks since June, in no small part to ensure
that the numbers were delivered.
But despite months of work, the
results, in Mr. Abowd’s and Ms. Velkoff’s view, fell far short of the bureau’s
standards for accuracy. Now the agency’s director, Steven Dillingham, was
demanding the tallies — accurate or not — before the president left office.
Mr. Abowd and Ms. Velkoff went to Ron
Jarmin, the deputy director. The trio, who had more than 75 years of experience
in the bureau among them, agreed on a response: They would reject the demand
unless they could explain in a technical report why the numbers were useless.
(In an interview this month, Mr. Dillingham said that he was merely asking for
an assessment of the immigrant tabulations, with whatever caveats were
necessary. “I said, look over that data and see if any of it is ready,” he
said.)
Mr. Jarmin then sent a message to three
other Census Bureau experts whom he had assigned to assist the political
appointees. Stop whatever you’re doing, it said. Any future orders will come
from me.
That internal struggle, which has not
been previously reported, was the breaking point in a battle with the Trump
administration over political interference in the census. By now, tales of
Trump appointees disrupting, or outright corrupting, the work of federal
agencies are familiar. But in this case, the meddling threatened not just to
change the allocation of federal power, but also to skew the distribution of
trillions of federal tax dollars.
It was not a revolt
or some sort of deep-state resistance that thwarted that effort. Instead, a
slice of the career bureaucracy that keeps the federal government running, day
in and day out, stood up for what it saw as the core function of the Census
Bureau — to produce the gold standard for data about the nation’s population.
“We tried to do what we thought was
statistically sound and valid,” Ms. Velkoff said in an interview in June. “If
we didn’t have a statistically sound and valid methodology, then we pushed
back.”
The episode pitting career officials
against political appointees raises an important question: Should the Census
Bureau be better protected from such political interference in the future?
The White House had initially sought to
identify unauthorized immigrants by adding
a question about citizenship to the census form itself. Mr. Abowd had
warned that doing so would harm the quality of the count. In focus groups the
bureau conducted, people in various ethic groups expressed an “unprecedented” level of concern about giving the
government identifying information, according to a 2017 report on the research.
Nonetheless, Wilbur Ross, the secretary of the Commerce Department, which
includes the Census Bureau, ordered the agency to go ahead with the citizenship
question.
But in June 2019, the Supreme
Court rejected Mr. Ross’s
proffered rationale — that adding the citizenship question was necessary to
better enforce the Voting Rights Act — calling it “contrived.”
With that avenue closed, the
administration immediately ordered the Census Bureau to gather data on unauthorized
immigrants by combing through records of some 20 federal agencies.
Mr. Abowd, Ms. Velkoff and their
colleagues spent the next year collecting immigrant data from the
administrative records. Then in July 2020, Mr. Trump ordered the data to be
used to remove unauthorized immigrants from the coming census totals that would
reapportion the House for the next decade. But to segregate unauthorized
immigrants from the census totals for each state, there first had to be a census.
And that was a
problem. In the summer of 2020, the bureau faced the huge challenge of counting
every household in the midst of a pandemic. Despite that, Mr. Ross ordered the
agency to finish the count by Sept. 30 and to produce the politically crucial
population figures for apportioning House seats among the states by Dec. 31.
The deadlines ensured the census totals would be delivered to Mr. Trump whether
or not he won the November election.
Internally, census officials were
aghast. Anyone who thought the agency could meet the December deadline, the
day-to-day leader of the census, Timothy Olson, wrote to Mr. Jarmin and other
senior census officials, “has either a mental deficiency or a political
motivation.”
But the anti-immigrant forces within Mr. Trump’s administration kept the pressure on, creating four new political jobs in the bureau’s top ranks — an unprecedented step — beginning in June 2020.
Senior bureau officials gave them
offices. They also quietly ordered that the appointees be given only rounded
numbers — estimates, which could not be labeled official for political or other
reasons.
The first of the new political
appointees was Nathaniel Cogley, a political-science professor at a state
university in rural Texas who has specialized in African studies. He was soon
joined by the other three, and they reported weekly to an aide to Mark Meadows,
Mr. Trump’s chief of staff.
Mr. Cogley began attacking the bureau’s
effort to count a small share of known households that evade the best efforts
of census takers. In these cases — 1.2 million people in 2010, but probably
many more in pandemic-scarred 2020 — the bureau has long used a statistical
method called imputation, looking at nearby households to make educated guesses
about who lives in the places the census field operation missed.
Some of those
households are occupied by right-leaning libertarians who are deeply suspicious
of the government. But many are low-income families, members of minorities and
unauthorized immigrants, who expand the count for urban areas and thus increase
representation for traditional Democratic strongholds.
“If you leave out imputations, you
leave out African Americans, Hispanics and other hard-to-count people,” Kimball
Brace, a demographer and president of a consulting firm that does work on
redistricting, said in an interview. Mr. Cogley called him to ask for evidence
that imputation was statistically unsound. “I saw Cogley’s view as totally a
way of justifying how the Republicans come out on this,” Mr. Brace said. (Mr.
Cogley did not respond to calls, texts and emails asking for comment.)
Mr. Ross had the power to order the
bureau to do as Mr. Cogley wished. But after listening to dueling
presentations, he allowed the imputation work to continue — handing the career
officials a victory on one of their most important concerns. (Mr. Ross declined
to comment on the record.)
In early November, when Joe Biden won
the presidential election, the 10-week clock for Mr. Trump’s time in office
began to tick with new urgency. There would be no second term. Mr. Abowd, Ms.
Velkoff and their colleagues raced to meet the Dec. 31 deadline. But the bureau
hit a major
technical snag:
The pandemic had scrambled the locations of tens of millions of people, like
college students and agricultural workers, who should have been counted where
they studied or worked but instead lived elsewhere temporarily because of the
coronavirus.
Putting them in their proper place
would take time. In late November, census officials told Mr. Dillingham,
the bureau’s director, that they could not meet the Dec. 31 deadline and
maintain the agency’s standards for accuracy.
Mr. Cogley and other political
appointees pressed for shortcuts to speed ahead, going so far as to suggest
commandeering computers from other agencies to accelerate data processing, an
idea the bureau dismissed as impractical. But the political appointees and the
White House never answered a basic question about the numbers they most wanted:
What definition of “unauthorized immigrant” should the bureau use? Did it
include people contesting their deportation in court? Or children whose
birthplace was unclear? Or immigrants whose green cards were being processed?
In December, the White House tried one
last tack: If census experts could not reliably say who should be removed from
the state-by-state apportionment totals because they were in the country
illegally, then administration officials would decide for them, using whatever
tabulations of immigrants the bureau provided.
This would take a
hammer to the bureau’s standards for accuracy. It would also reverse past
practice, in which the Census Bureau calculated the House apportionment and the
White House delivered the results to Congress as a formality. In January, Mr.
Dillingham told Mr. Jarmin it was the bureau’s No. 1 priority — above the
census itself — to turn over figures on undocumented immigrants to the White
House by Jan. 15. He acknowledged proposing cash bonuses to those who could
make it happen, but said he made sure anyone working on the project “would not
be pulled off the 2020 census data.”
This last-minute order, which Mr.
Dillingham delivered orally rather than in writing, was the breaking point for
the career officials who had carried out every other directive. “The integrity
of the statistical process that the Census Bureau is ethically committed to was
abrogated in serious ways,” Mr. Abowd said.
Separately and anonymously, three
career officials filed whistle-blower complaints with the Commerce Department’s inspector general. The
complaints accused Mr. Dillingham
of violating a cardinal rule for the federal government called Statistical
Policy Directive 1. “A federal statistical agency,” it states, “must be
independent from political and other undue external influence in developing,
producing and disseminating statistics.” Mr. Dillingham said this month that
when he heard about the complaints to the inspector general, he stopped asking
for the immigrant tabulations.
On Jan. 18, Mr. Dillingham resigned. Mr. Trump left
office two days later without the counts that would have downgraded the status
of immigrants and most likely helped more Republicans win election.
The census has been wielded
as a political weapon before. When the very first count in 1790
fell short (at 3.9 million) of George Washington’s expectations, he didn’t
change the number, but he instructed Thomas Jefferson to check it. When
Jefferson’s work produced an estimate above four million, he included the
higher number in descriptions of the census abroad to make the new country
appear stronger.
When the 1920 census counted rising
population totals in American cities — thanks to an influx of Italians, Poles,
Jews and others from outside Northern Europe — Congress refused to reapportion
the House until 1929 so that rural areas wouldn’t lose seats.
And most notoriously, after the bombing
of Pearl Harbor, the Army used census information to round up Japanese
Americans for internment. (In 2000, the bureau apologized.)
Now a group of
officials at the agency are considering how the census could be better
protected from political meddling and misuse. In July, a committee of career
professionals put in place a new policy
on data stewardship,
which firms up the rules governing internal as well as external access to
confidential data. A bigger idea is to move the bureau out of the Commerce
Department to make it more independent, like the National Science Foundation.
Congress could also mandate by statute that immigrants who reside in the country
must continue to be counted, as they always have been. Lawmakers (or the
president, by executive order) also could further strengthen the existing
safeguards in Statistical Policy Directive 1.
In the end, the delays that frustrated
the anti-immigrant ambitions of Mr. Trump’s administration may end up helping his party. The
bureau’s release of redistricting numbers on Thursday was several months behind
schedule. Republicans, who control more state legislatures and have shown a
greater appetite for extreme gerrymandering than Democrats have, could benefit
because little time remains to contest maps before the 2022 elections.
The newly released numbers will now set
the stage for what are likely to be colossal battles over control of the House
and State Legislatures.
For career professionals, “the highest
priority now,” Mr. Abowd said, “is restoring the credibility of the 2020 census
and the Census Bureau.”