Opinion
Why Does Trump Want an Inaccurate Census?
Congress must extend the deadline for the count.
By The
Editorial Board
The
editorial board is a group of opinion journalists whose views are informed by
expertise, research, debate and certain longstanding values. It is separate
from the newsroom.
Sept. 12,
2020
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.
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