For the first time, the federal government wants to stop collecting race and ethnicity information about Americans as part of the nation’s census, a move that could undercut market research, public policy, scientific study, civil rights enforcement and more.
In a proposal published Wednesday, the Census Bureau argued that collecting demographic data doesn’t advance the “fundamental” purpose of the decennial census to dole out seats in the House of Representatives.
Among its citations for the planned change is the Supreme Court decision that limited states’ ability to draw minority-majority districts by gutting a key section of the Voting Rights Act.
The census proposal confirmed researchers’ fears that President Donald Trump would target race and ethnicity data collection as an extension of the administration’s efforts to systematically scrub LGBTQ+ data from government datasets, as The Washington Sun has previously reported.
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“The census is our nation’s denominator,” Denice Ross, the U.S. chief data scientist in the Biden administration, told The Sun. It’s the “foundation for all analyses about demographics.”
Prohibiting questions in the decennial census about race, ethnicity or sexual orientation is one half of a sweeping, two-part proposal. The Census Bureau is also proposing to exclude noncitizens without a green card from the population count.
Both changes would have massive implications for the American public.
The removal of many non-U.S. citizens from apportionment data — which would probably be challenged in court — would affect how seats are allocated in the House of Representatives and how Electoral College votes are distributed.
Many states also use federal census data for redistricting, and race and ethnicity data is used to inform public policy, market research and more.
Race and ethnicity breakdowns in maternal mortality data, for example, are difficult to interpret without the baseline provided by the decennial census, said Ross, who now works on federal data policy at the Federation of American Scientists. She worries that other federal agencies will now also stop collecting race and ethnicity data in forms and surveys.
“There’s no substitute for the census data on this,” said Howard Fienberg, the senior vice president for advocacy at the Insights Association, which represents the market research industry.
That industry, he said, relies on demographic data from the census to benchmark studies.
“That’s trillions of dollars in the economy that’s being put at risk if they don’t have the decision-making tools that we’re able to provide,” Fienberg said. “Procter and Gamble is not going to figure out this new breakfast cereal by talking to every single person in the country.”
Scientists also use the race and ethnicity data collected in the census to study things like population aging, adolescent development and more, said MaryJo Mitchell, the director of government affairs for the Population Association of America, which represents researchers like demographers, economists and epidemiologists.
Demographic data from the census is fundamental to even getting started by creating a representative sample, she said.
“We’re looking at undoing centuries of standard census practices that have really defined what it means to have a decennial census,” she told The Washington Sun of the proposed changes. Every decennial census, which began in 1790, has included questions on race.
The other half of the new proposal resurrects failed attempts from the first Trump administration to change who is counted in the census.
The Census Bureau proposed adding a citizenship question to the 2020 census, an effort the Supreme Court blocked. Trump also tried in his first term to remove immigrants without lawful status from the apportionment count, although that effort was ultimately not implemented.
The latest proposal would mean that people such as refugees, people seeking asylum, undocumented immigrants and people in the U.S. with work or student visas would not be included in the data used to divide up seats in the House among the states.
How exactly the Census Bureau plans to exclude certain people from its products is unclear.
The Census Bureau says it is considering drawing on records across the government, including information housed at the Department of Homeland Security, as well as commercial data to determine people’s legal status.
Accurately linking up different datasets is extremely difficult, however, said Beth Jarosz, the vice president of the Association of Public Data Users, meaning that U.S. citizens could be flagged as noncitizens if the Census Bureau undertakes this data-matching exercise.
“They would absolutely, in essence, disenfranchise people accidentally,” Jarosz said.
The proposal also says the Census Bureau “could” add a question about legal status on the census questionnaire itself.
Research has found that adding a citizenship question to the decennial census would reduce the number of respondents and disproportionately affect populations that are already hard to count, like those without documentation.
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