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Struck by critics that the 2020 census has been dangerously politicized by the Trump administration, the US Census Bureau under a new administration Biden has the daunting task of restoring confidence in the numbers that will be used to determine funding and political power.
Picking up the pieces of a long and difficult process that unfolded during a global pandemic begins with being transparent about irregularities in the data, said former Census Bureau directors, lawmakers and advocates.
They advised the new administration to take more time to review and process the population counts to make sure they get them correctly. The high-stakes business will determine how many Congressional seats and Electoral College votes each state will get as well as the distribution of $ 1.5 trillion in federal spending each year.
“We are optimistic that things at the Census Bureau will get better. The question is whether the damage caused by the Trump administration can be corrected, ”said Marc Morial, president and CEO of the National Urban League. Morial’s organization, along with other advocacy groups and municipalities, sued former President Donald Trump’s government last year for deciding to prematurely end the once-per-decade roster.
Critics say this damage includes an unsuccessful effort to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census questionnaire and a Trump order to determine who is a citizen and who is illegally in the United States. They say another directive from Trump to illegally exclude people in the country from the distribution of congressional seats, shortened hours for collecting and processing data and four political appointments to high-level positions in the office have also threatened the integrity of the count.
Census officials across the country told The Associated Press and other media outlets that they were encouraged to falsify responses in a rush to complete the tally so that the numbers used to determine the number of seats in Congress that every state gets can be produced under the Trump administration. Census Bureau officials said these issues were isolated.
Census supporters were comforted on Wednesday by President Joe Biden’s swift revocations of Trump’s order to produce citizenship data and the former president’s memo attempting to illegally exclude people in the States- United of the distribution statement. The Biden administration is also committed to giving the Census Bureau the time it needs to process the data.
The Census Bureau also said Thursday that the redistribution of data it will release later this year for states and municipalities to use to create legislative districts will not include information on citizenship or immigration status. . He also said the agency was suspending all work to secure immigration status for U.S. residents for the census.
“President Biden’s swift action today finally closes the book on the Trump administration’s attempts to manipulate the census for political gain,” said Dale Ho, director of the ACLU’s Voting Rights Project, who s ‘is pronounced against the legality of the distribution note before the Supreme Court. year. The High Court ruled that any challenge was premature.
After the office missed a year-end deadline for submitting distribution figures, it said the figures would be completed as close as possible to the previous deadline. Lawyers for the Trump administration recently said they would not be ready until the beginning of March because the office needs time to correct the irregularities in the data.
There will be flaws, likely undercoverage of communities of color and overcoverage of whites, but “they’ll just have to ‘bake the best cake they can’ by identifying and correcting any errors they can find,” said Rob. Santos, president of the American Statistical Association.
Trump’s four political appointments to the Census Bureau last year have been denounced by Democratic statisticians and lawmakers fearing to politicize the once-per-decade people count. The Inspector General’s office said last week that two of them pressured office workers to find out who was in the United States illegally before Trump left office, a qualifying whistleblower this effort of “statistically indefensible”. The then director of the Census Bureau, Steven Dillingham, commissioned a technical report on the effort but cut it off after a backlash. He resigned this week after Democratic lawmakers and civil rights groups called for his departure.
The new acting head of the office, Deputy Director Ron Jarmin, did not respond to a request for an interview. He will report to Biden’s new pick to head the Commerce Department – which oversees the Census Bureau – Gina Raimondo, Governor of Rhode Island.
Former Census Bureau Director Kenneth Prewitt said he was optimistic the end product would be as accurate as previous censuses, especially now that Jarmin is at the helm.
“They know how to do it right. It just takes time, ”said Prewitt, who served in the Clinton administration.
Another former office manager, John Thompson, said the departure of those Trump appointees will help eliminate distractions to complete the 2020 census, but the agency is to hold a public forum to discuss the anomalies that office statisticians have found in the data and what they do. to correct them before delivery of the distribution numbers.
U.S. Senator Brian Schatz, a Democrat from Hawaii, has asked Biden to set up a non-partisan commission to review the breakdown data to make sure it is fair and accurate before it goes to representatives room.
“The Census Bureau faced a number of challenges with the 2020 census,” Schatz said in a letter. “Some, like the pandemic, were beyond the agency’s control. However, the Trump administration has actively interfered with the agency’s operations.
Despite pressure from their political bosses, career staff at the Census Bureau have stood up well to the Trump administration’s most questionable orders by coming forward when they found errors in the data without worrying about the deadline and denouncing to the inspector general when they felt pressured to produce a citizenship of questionable precision, according to Morial, Santos and Thompson.
“They deserve to be honored,” Santos said.
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This story corrected Rob Santos’ first name, instead of Ron Santos.
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Mike Schneider on Twitter at https://twitter.com/MikeSchneiderAP
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