Down for the Headcount

How Donald Trump is trying to rig the 2030 Census to give red states more congressional seats and more federal largesse than they deserve.

The Founding Fathers were not happy. The system of government they had created for the new nation wasn’t working. Any state in the single-chamber legislature could effectively ignore a law that it hadn’t voted for, worse, it could veto the measure for everybody. Hardly anything was getting done.

So in 1787, delegates to the Second Continental Congress reconvened in Philadelphia and came up with a new plan. Adopted laws would be binding on all states. States no longer had veto power on legislation. And to be adopted, laws must pass two separate chambers: a Senate consisting of two members from each state, and a House of Representatives with 65 members distributed by population.

There was just one problem: Nobody really knew how many people lived where, and that lack of certainty soon generated considerable squabbling among the delegates.

Then Virginia’s James Madison had an idea: Conduct a national door-to-door headcount. Thus was born the decennial U.S. Census, which soon became embedded in both the Constitution and the fabric of American life. The first count, in 1790, showed a total population of 3.9 million – a bit lower than expected, with Virginia’s share surprisingly large because of its many slaves.

But the drafters had agreed to include all such non-citizen residents in the census — though each slave was initially counted as only three-fifths of a person. The total U.S. population and that of its sub-categories were, after all, important things to know. Besides, the delegates recognized that anybody living in the U.S., regardless of status, would be affected by the legislature’s actions. The count-’em-all decision still stands, and 24 subsequent censuses have come off with nary a hitch.

That streak is about to end. The Trump Administration is planning to make subtle but far-reaching changes in the way the 2030 Census will be conducted. The new procedures could undercount many residents, disadvantage certain states and undermine the reputation for accuracy and non-partisan integrity that the enumeration has enjoyed for more than two centuries.

The changes reportedly include the President’s longstanding insistence that undocumented immigrants and other non-citizens no longer be counted – despite the Constitution’s injunction to include them -- and that mail-in census questionnaires be printed, and completed, in English rather than any of 13 other currently accepted languages.

In addition, the administration is cutting back on the number of test counts scheduled for later this year. The Census Bureau usually conducts a series of mid-decade practice runs to train enumerators, evaluate procedures and try out solutions to problems encountered in previous nosecounts. But the Administration has cut the number of such tests from six to two, both of them in heavily Republican southern states.

Another change cancels efforts to improve the way census takers handle “complex” locations, like tribal reservations, college dormitories, detention facilities, nursing homes, public housing projects and other places whose residents are typically undercounted – and most of whom tend to vote Democratic. Instead, the Census Bureau plans to question respondents about their citizenship and to test the feasibility of turning over much of the door-to-door work to the U.S. Postal Service, an agency already stretched thin.

Critics are suspicious. They say the citizenship question will discourage many residents from responding and that involving the Postal Service will worsen the undercounting problem. In addition, the changes as a whole would make it difficult to compare results of the 2030 Census to those of its predecessors and, as a result, to judge how reliable the new results really are.

It is “fair to suggest that this is politically motivated,” as Beth Jarosz, vice president of the Association of Public Data Users, told the news site NOTUS. “There are attacks coming from a lot of different directions to try and affect the count in a way that benefits a certain political party.”

That party and its adherents have much to gain. The census determines not just representation in the House of Representatives, but also the share each state receives of nearly $3 trillion a year in federal spending on such public goods as highways, education and healthcare. Over a decade, that’s a lot of money.

Come January 2029, of course, a new president will be in the White House – and, perhaps, a different party will control Congress – nearly a full year before the big count begins. But given the enormity of that undertaking, it may be too late to undo the current administration’s changes completely = or at all. As a result, vast numbers of residents could be undercounted. Some deserving states may also see their previous congressional representation reduced and their share of government spending slashed for at least the next 10 years.

Indeed, the political party that is currently reconfiguring the 2030 census to its benefit could easily use the ensuing advantage in the House – and, as a result, the Electoral College that selects the President – to entrench itself for decades, regardless of what most majority voters actually prefer.

Somehow, such an outcome is hardly what James Madison had in mind 239 years ago when he proposed that the project of American democracy be based on truth and reality, not guesswork – and definitely not on partisan politics.