When the constitutional architects of the United States got together, they came up with a crazy plan: “What if we count everyone in the country and allocate political representation that way?”
It was a radical act. Until then, censuses had been used by kings to levy taxes and conscript men into war. With the penning of article 1, section 2 of the US constitution, being counted ensured that states would get financial resources and political representatives. Congress was tasked with building the processes to anchor representation to the population. People wanted to be counted. And politicians wanted theirpeople to be counted more.
For more than a century, professionals at the US Census Bureau have built protocols and established norms to resist partisan interference. Scientists and other experts work together to make the best data possible so that democracy can function. But many of their systems are being upended and challenged by “Jenga politics”.
In the game of Jenga, players take turns pulling out planks and adding more pressure to the top, hoping someone else will be blamed for making the tower collapse. This is what’s happening to our government. Few politicians publicly admit that they are trying to dismantle our administrative state – although some do – but it’s teetering on the brink. Meanwhile, oft-maligned civil servants are running around with duct tape trying to keep the whole tower from falling.
The public pays little attention to the census. The census involves math. It is wonky. Eyes glaze over when government officials start talking about statistical methods and esoteric policies for governing data. It’s hard to convince most people – perhaps including you? – to care about the census. This has created a vulnerability that weakens the American republic.
Politicians understand the power of the census. And since the beginning, they have schemed different ways to shape the data to their advantage. Congress has responded by building rules around both the construction of data and its use. Courts have reinforced these rules by constructing guardrails to ensure that the public is counted and that Congress gets final say over how the data are made.
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In modern times, politicians have focused their energies on usingcensus data to best one another in the political sport of redistricting. However irritating gerrymandering is, using rigorously produced data in political games is fundamentally different from directly manipulating the underlying infrastructure of data-making in the country. This summer, we’ve seen the latter. The very mechanisms that allow the Census Bureau to resist partisan interference are coming undone. And Congress is silent.
After having forcibly retired thousands of dedicated civil servants who held a gobsmacking amount of institutional knowledge, the Trump administration has increasingly made impossible demands of those who remain. In June, they ordered the Census Bureau to stop using the most sophisticated techniques available to protect the confidentiality of the public’s responses when publishing data. Government scientists were told that they must return to the statistical dark ages and use methods that horrify their peers. By micromanaging the tools that experts can use, politicians are forcing civil servants to choose between publishing unusable data, risking the privacy of Americans’ data, or simply not publishing data.
In August,another controversy roiled the Census Bureau. Partisan data geeks leveraged a program designed to help the government recruit talent. Once there, they obtained access to government data and leveraged the bureau’s brand to publish a report arguing that numerous non-citizens voted in the 2020 election, reinforcing Trump’s conspiracy theory that he did not lose the election fair and square.
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This report is anomalous in countless ways: it’s unsigned, lacking methodological detail, devoid of error metrics, and rushed through without oversight by the bureau’s experts. But it doesn’t matter how bad the report was (and it’s truly abysmally bad). The reputational damage was done. Economists and advocates from across the partisan spectrum were outraged at this blatant politicization of the Census Bureau.
The Trump administration doubled down. Days later, the commerce department eliminated the language that prohibited political interference from the agency’s official scientific integrity policy.
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This week, the Trump administration released a new bombshell. In outlining how it will govern the 2030 decennial census, the Census Bureau has indicated that it plans to stop collecting data about race and only count a subset of the population, contrary to what the constitution requires. This is part of the “residence rules” that the Census Bureau produces in the middle of the decade to finalize its operational plan. While purportedly intended to make the census “colorblind” and to protect the privacy of respondents, these proposed changes to the residence rules will ensure that anti-discrimination laws – such as the Voting Rights Act – that are anchored to the census data can’t be enforced.
These incidents collectively reveal that well-honed norms and protocols that uphold the Census Bureau are being battered, even as the Trump administration chooses to use other standard procedures. Taken together, these upheavals undermine the legitimacy of our institutions and directly harm the data. If we don’t trust democracy’s data, we can’t have a functioning democracy. Civil servants will do their best to do “the impossible”, as they put it, but they can only do so much without the support of Congress and the public. If neither understand nor appreciate what our civil servants do, we cannot prevent the Jenga tower from falling.
Congress is constitutionally responsible for the census. They have final say over what questions are asked, who is to be counted, and what methods are acceptable. Whether they know it or not, the Congress that is elected this November will make critical decisions that will irrevocably determine how the next census unfolds. They could take an active role in governing the census, as the constitution asks of them, or they could allow the Trump administration to weaponize the process.
While most members of the public won’t pay much attention to the census until 2030, all the key systems will be locked and loaded by 2028. The operational plan will be finalized, the questions will be decided, and the staffing capacity will be locked in.
Congress has the power and responsibility to ensure that the census is both functional and legitimate. By not taking this responsibility seriously and allowing the census to be politicized by the executive branch, both parties are driving a stake through the heart of the American project.
