Census Memo Cites 'Unprecedented' Meddling by Trump Administration

Source: New York Times

Census Memo Cites ‘Unprecedented’ Meddling by Trump Administration

Newly released documents show that top career officials at the Census Bureau had drafted a list of complaints about political interference in the 2020 count.

By Michael Wines
Jan. 15, 2022
Updated 9:21 a.m. ET

WASHINGTON — A newly disclosed memorandum citing “unprecedented” meddling by the Trump administration in the 2020 census and circulated among top Census Bureau officials indicates how strongly they sought to resist efforts by the administration to manipulate the count for Republican political gain. (1)

The document was shared among three senior executives including Ron S. Jarmin, a deputy director and the agency’s day-to-day head. It was written in September 2020 as the administration was pressing the bureau to end the count weeks early so that if President Donald J. Trump lost the election in November, he could receive population estimates used to reapportion the House of Representatives before leaving office.

The memo laid out a string of instances of political interference that senior census officials planned to raise with Wilbur Ross, who was then the secretary of the Commerce Department, which oversees the bureau. The issues involved crucial technical aspects of the count, including the privacy of census respondents, the use of estimates to fill in missing population data, pressure to take shortcuts to produce population totals quickly and political pressure on a crash program that was seeking to identify and count unauthorized immigrants.

Most of those issues directly affected the population estimates used for reapportionment. In particular, the administration was adamant that — for the first time ever — the bureau separately tally the number of undocumented immigrants in each state. Mr. Trump had ordered the tally in a July 2020 presidential memorandum, saying he wanted to subtract them from House reapportionment population estimates. ... The census officials’ memorandum pushed back especially forcefully, complaining of “direct engagement” by political appointees with the methods that experts were using to find and count unauthorized noncitizens.

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Michael Wines writes about voting and other election-related issues. Since joining The Times in 1988, he has covered the Justice Department, the White House, Congress, Russia, southern Africa, China and various other topics. @miwine https://twitter.com/miwine

(1) https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/12/sunday-review/census-redistricting-trump-immigrants.html

Read more: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/15/us/2020-census-trump.html

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Hat tip, Joe.My.God.

https://www.joemygod.com/2022/01/memo-cites-trump-admin-screwing-with-us-census/

Memo Cites Trump Admin Screwing With US Census
January 15, 2022