Census Changes Threaten Fair Funding and Representation

The U.S. Census Bureau is the largest statistical agency in the federal government. It sets data collection norms and standards rooted in impartiality and methodological rigor for government agencies at all levels. These standards are under threat. Over the last year, the agency has experienced brain drain through layoffs and voluntary departures. These and other recent developments have created data delays and jeopardized the scientific integrity and credibility of this critical institution.

Then, at the end of August, the Commerce Department removed regulatory language that noted the Census should be protected from inappropriate influence. But outside political interests are inappropriately influencing the Census Bureau in ways that will have real consequences for communities.

Earlier in the summer, the Commerce Department, which oversees the Census Bureau, announced  it would no longer allow the addition of “statistical noise,” or “differential privacy,” as a method for protecting individuals’ privacy. When survey information is collected in small or sparsely populated areas,  it’s possible that individual people could be identified through their responses or reported demographics. Because the government must protect people’s privacy, statisticians will add “noise,” which is a mathematically sound method for obscuring exact counts while still producing valid estimates with a small margin of error. This methodology was rigorously tested before being used for the 2020 Census. 

Trump Administration-aligned policy shops like the Center for Renewing America and America First Legal have falsely asserted that this statistical noise could somehow benefit Democrats when Congressional maps are drawn. But this method has no impact on the state-level population counts used for Congressional apportionment and can’t affect the state composition of Congressional seats. Conservatives are peddling a misleading claim to target a statistically sound, relatively obscure data process.

Without differential privacy, Census Bureau officials will rely on  older, less precise methods for presenting data when privacy is a concern, such as ‘coarsening’ (rounding or grouping data) or ‘suppression’ (not releasing at all). We’ll know much less about neighborhood-level demographics and sparse or  rural areas, which will make it more difficult to target resources like federal education dollars to the children, families, and schools who may need them most. 

Meanwhile, earlier this month, the Census Bureau proposed another set of worrying policy changes: new rules for the 2030 Census form that most American residents complete. The first change would exclude undocumented people from the population count by establishing new permanent residence criteria for determining who is eligible to be counted in the Census, unconstitutionally leaving them out of the calculus when new Congressional and legislative districts are drawn. The second change would remove race and ethnicity questions from the Census form entirely,  a sharp turn away from a policy that was announced during the Biden Administration that would have offered respondents a new range of race and ethnicity options to choose from. It seems the Bureau’s new policy is to not allow people to identify themselves racially at all. A third change would prohibit questions about sexual orientation, even though the Census has never asked about it directly. (The 2020 decennial Census did allow people to share that they resided with same-sex partners for the first time, but that change would presumably be reversed.)

These methodology and form revisions are direct evidence that this administration’s Census Bureau has abandoned political neutrality. These ideas came from a political organization outside the government. The right-wing Heritage Foundation, in its familiar Project 2025 policy playbook, urges that “both committed political appointees and like-minded career employees are in [sic] immediately put in place to execute a conservative agenda.”  

The implication of these policy changes and dismantling of federal data collection infrastructure is alarming.  Without accurate demographic data, we risk excluding people from their due representation in our democracy. We would also lose the ability to measure the disparate impact of government policies and private sector practices on historically excluded communities, like communities of color and gender and sexual minorities. Disparate impact is a concept in antidiscrimination law. When a facially neutral policy has a disproportionately negative impact on groups of people based on immutable characteristics like race, sex, or gender, it is said to have disparate impact on those groups. The policy change would make this civil rights enforcement nearly impossible.

Disparate impact, and its role in civil rights law, is a Trump Administration obsession. For instance, education advocates have long leveraged the Department of Education’s Civil Rights Data Collection (CRDC) to reveal and address the disproportionately high rates at which students of color, particularly Black boys, are disciplined compared to their white peers for comparable behavior. Project 2025 explicitly calls to end the disparate impact standard in school civil rights enforcement, meaning disparate impact would no longer be considered evidence of discrimination. We see the impact of this call in the most recent release of the CRDC, which excluded already-collected data on the experiences of nonbinary children in schools, even though we know LGBTQ+ youth experience disproportionate rates of bullying and mental health challenges. Without a good idea of which communities are experiencing difficulty or harm, we cannot effectively target remedies.

The proposed and confirmed changes to the Census Bureau’s data collection threaten the integrity of our country’s largest and leading statistical agency. They also lay the groundwork for federal data collection infrastructure to be transformed from a precise, if imperfect tool for the advancement of civil rights to a blunt instrument used to exclude communities and deprive them of needed and deserved government resources.

This should concern us all. Communities across the country are changing – becoming more racially diverse, multicultural, and multilingual. Instead of embracing change and supporting communities’, including rural communities’, increasingly diverse needs, the proposed changes to federal data collection will make it harder to understand our country and to target resources where they’re needed most.