Jeff Wice Newsday oped:
Fair representation in Congress is under attack. Several bills aim to limit the population used for allotting the 435 congressional districts among the states. …These current efforts threaten equal representation, and census accuracy, for Long Island, New York, and the nation….
NPR:
Republicans in Congress are reviving a controversial push to alter a key set of census numbers that are used to determine how presidents and members of the U.S. House of Representatives are elected.
Ratified after the Civil War, the 14th Amendment says the “whole number of persons in each state” must be included in what are called apportionment counts, the population numbers based on census results that determine each state’s share of House seats and Electoral College votes for a decade.
But GOP lawmakers have now released three bills this year that would use the 2030 census to tally residents without U.S. citizenship, and then subtract some or all of them from the apportionment counts. Republicans on the House Appropriations Committee unveiled the latest bill Monday.
Any attempt to carry out the unprecedented exclusion of millions of noncitizens from the apportionment counts of the 2030 census is likely to undermine the head count’s accuracy and face legal challenges, as the first Trump administration did in its failed push for similar changes for the 2020 census.
Hansi Lo Wang for NPR.
Hansi Lo Wang for NPR:
An apparent attempt by the U.S. Census Bureau to follow an executive order by President Trump targeting gender identity led to the public losing access for days to certain key statistics.
Close to two weeks after users first noticed many parts of the bureau’s website — like those of other agencies — had gone dark, the federal government’s largest statistical agency has yet to make any public statement about the disappearing data and research, at least some of which now appears to be restored.
The lack of an official explanation from the bureau — known for producing closely monitored indicators about the U.S. population and economy — is raising concerns among data users about threats to public trust in the agency and its independence from political interference, as Elon Musk’s team within the Trump administration known as the Department of Government Efficiency seek data access at multiple agencies, including the Bureau of Labor Statistics….
Hansi Lo Wang for NPR:
The director of the U.S. Census Bureau, Robert Santos, announced Thursday he is resigning, giving President Trump an early opportunity to nominate a new political appointee to lead the agency.
Arturo Vargas, chair of the bureau’s 2030 Census Advisory Committee, tells NPR that the committee’s members received an email announcement, a copy of which NPR has reviewed.
“It’s been such an honor to serve our nation,” Santos wrote Thursday in a LinkedIn post sharing NPR’s story after it was published. The bureau’s public information office did not immediately respond to NPR’s inquiries.
The decision by Santos, who started as the bureau’s director in 2022, cuts short a five-year appointment during key preparations for the 2030 census. The next constitutionally required head count of the country’s residents is set to be used to redistribute political representation and trillions in federal funding across the country over the next decade.,,,
Before becoming the agency’s director, Santos was a vocal opponent of how Trump officials handled the 2020 census — including a last-minute decision to end counting early during the COVID-19 pandemic and a failed push to add a question about U.S. citizenship status that was likely to deter many Latino and Asian American residents from participating in the official population tally
New report from the Brennan Center.
Story from the Associated Press. Similar pieces have been popping up this month, including in the New York Times. 2030 may seem like a long time away, but fitting into the legal framework will take some time. The Times piece notes the 1999 Supreme Court decision in Department of Commerce v. United States House, which held that “sampling” was an impermissible technique. But that decision formally rests on a statutory decision; four justices in a concurring opinion (authored by Justice Scalia) sparred with dissenting justices (particularly Justice Stevens) about whether the scope of constitutional authority to engage in “sampling.” A later Supreme Court decision, Utah v. Evans in 2002, found that a different technique, “hot-deck imputation,” passed both constitutional and statutory muster (over a couple of dissenting opinions). There are things Congress could do, and there are unanswered constitutional questions out there.
Hansi Lo Wang for NPR.
New article by Christopher T. Kenny et al., in Science Advances. Abstract:
Census statistics play a key role in public policy decisions and social science research. However, given the risk of revealing individual information, many statistical agencies are considering disclosure control methods based on differential privacy, which add noise to tabulated data. Unlike other applications of differential privacy, however, census statistics must be postprocessed after noise injection to be usable. We study the impact of the U.S. Census Bureau’s latest disclosure avoidance system (DAS) on a major application of census statistics, the redrawing of electoral districts. We find that the DAS systematically undercounts the population in mixed-race and mixed-partisan precincts, yielding unpredictable racial and partisan biases. While the DAS leads to a likely violation of the “One Person, One Vote” standard as currently interpreted, it does not prevent accurate predictions of an individual’s race and ethnicity. Our findings underscore the difficulty of balancing accuracy and respondent privacy in the Census.
A plan to protect the confidentiality of Americans’ responses to the 2020 census by injecting small, calculated distortions into the results is raising concerns that it will erode their usability for research and distribution of state and federal funds.
The Census Bureau is due to release the first major results of the decennial count in mid-August. They will offer the first detailed look at the population and racial makeup of thousands of counties and cities, as well as tribal areas, neighborhoods, school districts and smaller areas that will be used to redraw congressional, legislative and local districts to balance their populations.
And from NPR, “For The U.S. Census, Keeping Your Data Anonymous And Useful Is A Tricky Balance”
Government Executive has corrected its story on DOJ’s decision not to prosecute Wilbur Ross, now noting that the decision not to prosecute was made in the previous administration. The original ELB post has also been updated to note this correction.
Government Executive reports. [UPDATE: this correction has been appended to the report: After publication of this story, the Justice Department and Commerce Department inspector general revealed additional information to indicate the declination to prosecute took place during the Trump administration. This story has been corrected to note this information.]
Dean Vik Amar and Professor Jason Mazzone, both of the University of Illinois, have a two part series (one, two) at Justia’s “Verdict” on McConchie v. Illinois State Board of Elections, a challenge to Illinois’s redistricting plan. From the opening of the second piece:
In this—the second—installment in our series on McConchie v. Illinois State Board of Elections, in which Republican Minority Leaders in the Illinois General Assembly (in their official capacity and as registered voters) challenge in federal court the constitutionality of the apportionment of state legislative districts that the General Assembly and the Governor recently enacted, we focus on remedies. Our prior discussion flagged standing and ripeness hurdles the plaintiffs will need to overcome in order to get to the merits of their claim. And as to the merits themselves, we expressed doubts about whether the plaintiffs should and will prevail in their argument that because the Illinois legislature used a population survey rather than (traditionally) more reliable but not yet available decennial census results based on the 2020 national count, the enacted redistricting plan violates the one-person, one-vote requirement of the Fourteenth Amendment.
Yet even if the federal courts were to agree that the plaintiffs have overcome the justiciability hurdles and that they have established a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment, we are skeptical that it would be proper for the courts to grant the remedies the plaintiffs are seeking.