Why Does Trump Want an Inaccurate
Census?
Congress
must extend the deadline for the count.
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- Sept. 12, 2020, 2:34 p.m. ET
It’s hard to overstate the importance
of the census to everyday life in the United States. The vast amount of demographic
information it gathers determines who gets how much political power in Congress
and the states; it steers more than a trillion dollars in federal funding for
health care and other critical services; it guides long-term economic decisions
by governments, corporations and mom-and-pop stores; it helps determine the
location of highways and schools, hospitals and housing, police and fire
stations.
All Americans, wherever they live and
whatever their politics, depend on the census being as complete and accurate as
possible. In the middle of a pandemic that shut down much of the country for
months, that means allowing extra time for the count to be finished and the
data to be processed. So why is the Trump administration fighting this every
step of the way?
In the best of times, it takes a lot of
effort to go door to door to count everyone who didn’t return a census form. In
times like these, it’s far harder. That’s why, back in April, as the
coronavirus upended life across the globe, the Census Bureau extended its deadline for in-person data
collection from Aug. 15 to Oct. 31.
The bureau also
requested an extra four months to process and deliver its data to Congress,
which uses that data to apportion districts for the House of Representatives.
This was clearly necessary. Four former census directors agreed with the request.
So, at the time, did President Trump. “I don’t know if you even have to ask
them. This is called an act of God,” he said. “They have
to give it, and I think 120 days isn’t nearly enough.”
But Congress didn’t give it — or, more
precisely, Republicans in Congress didn’t. After the Democratic-led House of
Representatives included the four-month extension in its version of the
coronavirus relief bill known as the Heroes Act, the Senate majority leader
Mitch McConnell, refused to sign on.
Then, in August, the
administration abruptly and without explanation reversed course,
announcing that the data collection would end one month early, on Sept. 30. The
deadline to deliver the apportionment data to Congress remains Dec. 31, rather
than April 30, 2021, as the bureau had requested in the spring. In other words,
the bureau has about half the time it initially asked for to complete its work.
On Sept. 4, a federal judge in
California temporarily blocked the administration’s early end
date, writing that “an inaccurate count would not be remedied for another
decade.” The block lasts until Thursday, when the judge expects the administration
to explain why it needs to wrap the census up so quickly.
Anyone who has been paying attention
for the past four years knows exactly why: The Trump administration has, time
and again, used its executive power to try to keep and maintain political
power.
That’s what led Mr.
Trump to try to put a citizenship question on the census, and then to defend it
so dishonestly that even a Republican-appointed majority on the Supreme
Court refused to buy it.
It’s also what led Mr. Trump to issue
an executive order last month excluding all undocumented immigrants from the
census reapportionment process. This past Thursday, a unanimous three-judge
panel in Federal District Court in New York struck down the
order, saying that the case was “not particularly close or complicated.” This
is true. The Constitution explicitly requires that the census count all
“persons” — not just all citizens, or all white people, or all Trump
supporters.
Mr. Trump’s effort to stop the census
count early in the middle of a pandemic is of a piece with this campaign of
exclusion. The people who are most likely to be uncounted — those from
marginalized, poor or otherwise hard-to-reach communities — are those whom the
president considers undeserving of equal treatment.
But like any rush job, this is going to
lead to major problems for everyone, as bureau officials have admitted in
public and in private. In July, Albert Fontenot Jr., the census’s associate
director, said, “We are past
the window of being able to get those counts” by the end of 2020. Earlier this
month, the House Oversight Committee flagged an
internal Census Bureau document, which it received from a whistle-blower and
which warned that the “highly compressed schedule” will “reduce accuracy” and
“creates risk for serious errors not being discovered in the data.”
These errors aren’t just numbers on a
spreadsheet. They have consequences for real people’s lives. Of the more than
$1.5 trillion in federal funding allocated to the states based on census data,
75 percent goes to Medicare and Medicaid, according to Andrew Reamer, a
research professor at George Washington University who studies the use and
impact of census data.
Census data will be especially
important over the next decade as the country confronts the long-term public
health impact of the coronavirus pandemic. This will include, among other
things, tracking the incidence of the virus, conducting epidemiological
research and providing funds for medical equipment.
Such data are also essential to the
functioning of the national economy. They provide large and small businesses
with information about work forces and markets. They drive federal regulation
of small-business loans, home mortgages and equal-employment practices.
“If someone wanted to
screw up the American economy, a great way to do it is to screw up the census,”
Mr. Reamer said. “There is no better, quicker way to make sure we’re wasting a
lot of money and losing jobs.”
And, of course, the census data
determine the allocation of political power in Congress and the states. For
that reason, an accurate count should matter especially to lawmakers, who care
about getting money for their states and holding on to their seats. But with a
few exceptions, like Senator Steve Daines of
Montana and Senators Lisa Murkowski and Dan Sullivan of Alaska, Republicans
have stayed silent. That’s true even in states like Kentucky and Alabama, deep red
strongholds that stand to lose tens of millions of dollars in
federal funding every year if there is even a 1 percent undercount in the
census, according to reports released this week by the House Oversight
Committee. Is Mr. McConnell listening?
The census is the first task of
government laid out in the Constitution, and one of the most important.
Properly conducted, it gives the clearest possible picture of what America
looks like. That’s essential for a representative democracy.
It’s heartening that
federal judges at all levels have seen through the Trump administration’s
attempts to distort and hobble the census. But even if the count gets another
month to finish, that will be no help unless the other deadlines are extended,
too. Americans shouldn’t have to rely on the courts to do the job the
Constitution assigns to Congress.
