The Trump administration proposed major changes Wednesday to the decennial census, calling for elimination of questions on race, ethnicity and sexual orientation, which it said would bring the questionnaire more in line with the census’s original purpose.
The proposal also calls for dropping illegal immigrants and temporary foreign visitors from the official apportionment count, which is used to divvy up the 435 seats in the House of Representatives.
The changes would be among the biggest ever to the main census count, which takes place every 10 years and surveys every household in the country.
Census officials said the proliferation of demographic questions has tainted the survey, causing some people to refuse to respond. And the granularity of data now available could make it possible to identify specific census respondents, creating an invasion of their privacy, the bureau said.
“The collection of such data does not, by itself, advance the fundamental, constitutional purpose of the decennial census, which is to conduct an enumeration to ascertain the population count for apportionment,” Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said in the proposal, released Wednesday and scheduled to be published in the Federal Register on Thursday.
That will kick off a 30-day public comment period, and the Commerce Department would then have to ponder changes and finalize the plan before it takes effect.
The question changes would apply only to the short-form questionnaire, which is sent to all households every 10 years.
Other audits, such as the more thorough American Community Survey, which scrutinizes a rotating subset of homes, could still ask demographic questions.
That data, as well as information held by other government agencies, could plug any data gaps that arise from dropping the questions from the short form, the bureau said.
Trump opponents are already lining up against the ideas.
“The administration’s proposal is a flagrant assault on our democracy, designed to manipulate voting maps and dilute the political representation of diverse American communities,” said William Roberts, senior vice president at the liberal-leaning Center for American Progress.
Opponents said the Constitution requires counting all people in the U.S., including illegal immigrants, when it mandates a count of the “whole number of persons in each state.”
The Census Bureau, in the new proposal, said the “whole persons” requirement contains an element of “allegiance” to the country. Illegal immigrants and those here on only temporary status should fall outside of that, the bureau argued.
“In particular, the Census Bureau finds merit in the interpretive argument outlined above and has preliminarily determined that, under the best reading of the constitutional mandate, illegal aliens (among others) should not be included in the apportionment count, as they are not true inhabitants, members of the body politic, or persons with a ’usual residence’ in the United States due to their lack of a sufficient tie and allegiance to the United States,” Mr. Lutnick wrote.
Steven Camarota, the research director at the Center for Immigration Studies who has tracked apportionment, said likely 17 million to 18 million people would be considered illegal immigrants or temporary legal visitors.
Removing them could shift a handful of seats among the states, though it wouldn’t be a massive change.
Figuring out how to exclude migrants from the count could be tricky.
Census officials, in the new proposal, said they think they can use information from other agencies to try to identify illegal immigrants. Failing that, they could also add a new demographic question asking specifically about legal status.
The first Trump administration tried to add a question about citizenship to the 2020 count, but that was blocked by the Supreme Court.
The justices, in a divided ruling, said the Census Bureau has the right to ask about citizenship — and indeed, did so for many iterations — but Mr. Trump’s team botched the effort to rush the question onto the 2020 count.
In particular, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. said, the administration used a pretext to defend the question, rather than admitting the true reasons for it.
The new regulatory proposal explains at length its reasons.
Dropping the race, ethnicity and sexual orientation questions “would reduce response burden as well as the risk of disclosure,” Mr. Lutnick said.
The census became a political issue in 2010, amid the rise of the conservative tea party movement, with some adherents refusing to fill out the form in protest of its intrusiveness.
The 2020 census short form asked for the number of people in a household, each person’s name, sex, date of birth, race and ethnicity. The form also asked for a telephone number for the person who filled out the form.
Data from the decennial count is the backbone for other surveys, which are often adjusted to match the demographic breakdown of the 10-year count.
Eliminating the demographic questions could affect that other work.
Mr. Camarota said the demographic questions are also used to figure out any undercount from the 10-year survey, and that could be trickier without that data.
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