Battered by criticism that the 2020 census dangerously politicized by the Trump administration, the US Census Bureau under a new Biden administration has the arduous task of restoring confidence in the numbers that will be used to determine funding and political power.
Picking up the pieces of a long, painstaking process unfolding during a global pandemic begins with transparency about data irregularities, former Census Bureau directors, lawmakers and lawyers said.
They advised the new government to take more time to review and process the population figures to make sure they were doing them right. The high stake will determine how many congressional and electoral college votes each state gets, as well as the split of $ 1.5 trillion in federal spending each year.
“We are optimistic that things will be better at the Census Bureau. The question is whether the damage caused by the Trump administration can be repaired, ”said Marc Morial, president and CEO of the National Urban League. Morial’s organization, along with other advocacy groups and municipalities, last year sued the administration of former President Donald Trump over a decision to end the once-in-ten year head count prematurely.
According to critics, that damage includes a failed attempt to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census questionnaire and a Trump order to find out who is a citizen and who is in the US illegally. They say another Trump directive to illegally exclude people in the country from the distribution of congressional seats, shortened schedules to collect and process data, and four political appointments to top positions within the bureau also threatened the count’s integrity.
Census officials across the country have told The Associated Press and other media outlets they were encouraged to falsify comments in the rush to complete the census so that the numbers used to determine how many congressional seats each state gets can be produced under the Trump administration. Census Bureau officials said such issues were isolated.
Supporters of the census were encouraged on Wednesday by President Joe Biden’s swift revocation of Trump’s order to produce citizenship data and the former president’s memo attempting to illegally exclude people in the US from the distribution. Biden’s administration has also committed to give the Census Bureau the time it takes to process the data.
The Census Bureau also said on Thursday that the redistribution of data it releases later this year for states and municipalities to use in creating legislative districts will not include information on citizenship or immigration status. It also said the agency is suspending all work to obtain US residents’ immigration status for the census.
“President Biden’s swift action today finally shuts down the book on the Trump administration’s attempts to manipulate the census for political gain,” said Dale Ho, director of the ACLU’s Voting Rights Project, who explained the legality of the distribution key. the Supreme Court last disputed. year. The Supreme Court ruled that any challenge was premature.
After the agency missed a year-end deadline for the distribution key, it said the numbers would be completed as close to the previous deadline as possible. The Trump administration’s lawyers recently said they will not be ready until the beginning of March because the agency needs time to resolve irregularities in the data.
There will be flaws, probably under-numbers of colored communities and too many whites, but “they will just have to ‘bake the best cake possible’ by identifying and correcting the mistakes they can find,” said Rob Santos, president of the American Statistical Association.
Trump’s four political appointments to the Census Bureau last year were denounced by statisticians, and Democratic lawmakers feared they would politicize the once every ten year count. The Office of Inspector General said last week that two of them pressured office workers to find out who was illegal in the US before Trump left office, with a whistleblower calling the effort “statistically indefensible.” The then director of the Census Bureau, Steven Dillingham, ordered a technical report on that attempt, but called it off after a backlash. He resigned this week after democratic lawmakers and civil rights groups called for his departure.
The agency’s new interim chief, Deputy Director Ron Jarmin, did not respond to a request for an interview. He will report on Biden’s new choice to head the Commerce Department – which oversees the Census Bureau – Rhode Island Governor Gina Raimondo.
Former Census Bureau director Kenneth Prewitt said he is optimistic the final product will be as accurate as previous counts, especially now that Jarmin is at the helm.
“They know how to do it right. It just takes time, ”said Prewitt, who served in the Clinton administration.
Another former bureau director, John Thompson, said the departure of Trump’s appointees will help eliminate distractions from completing the 2020 census, but the bureau should hold a public forum to discuss which agency’s deviations statisticians have found in the data and what they are doing to fix it before the distribution key is returned.
US Senator Brian Schatz, a Democrat from Hawaii, asked Biden to set up an independent committee to review the distribution data to ensure it is fair and accurate before it is delivered to the House of Representatives.
“The Census Bureau faced a number of challenges with the 2020 Census,” Schatz said in a letter. Some, like the pandemic, were beyond the control of the agency. However, the Trump administration actively interfered with the agency’s activities. “
Despite the pressure from their political bosses, the Census Bureau career staff has well resisted the Trump administration’s most questionable orders by coming forward when they found errors in the data without worrying about the deadline and by Whistleblowing to the Inspector General when they felt pressured to produce citizenship of questionable accuracy, according to Morial, Santos and Thompson.
“They deserve to be honored,” said Santos.
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This story corrected Rob Santos’ first name, instead of Ron Santos.
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Mike Schneider on Twitter at https://twitter.com/MikeSchneiderAP