A Census Bureau panel of expert advisers on Friday rebuked the Trump administration’s decision to add a question on citizenship to the 2020 census, saying the move relied on “flawed logic” and posed a host of potential threats to the accuracy and confidentiality of the head count.
The panel, the Census Scientific Advisory Committee, said the addition of the citizenship question would depress the response to the census and stir a potentially damaging flood of misinformation about the government’s plans for the citizenship information it collects.
The objections were included in a statement to the acting director of the Census Bureau, Ron Jarmin, issued at the end of the panel’s semiannual meeting. The panel, a group of prominent demographers, economists and other experts, advises Mr. Jarmin on census preparations.
The group’s two-day meeting at the bureau’s headquarters in Suitland, Md., was punctuated by concerns and complaints, some of them anguished, about what the decision would do to the census and to the bureau itself.