Census Bureau Quietly Scraps Plan for Improved Data Collection on Race and Ethnicity

The Census Bureau is walking back plans to unveil a new, more inclusive way to document race and ethnicity, delaying updates that would have affected policy about everything from SNAP benefits uptake to redistricting. 

New race and ethnicity collection standards will no longer be used in the 2027 American Community Survey (ACS), according to a little-noticed update posted last month to the Federal Register. The ACS is largely viewed as the first look into how the consequential 2030 Census could shape up. And experts told TPM the Bureau’s indication that it won’t be using the updated race and ethnicity survey question standards puts at risk improved civil rights policy, redistricting, and more than a decade of research.

The scrapping of Statistical Policy Directive 15, or SPD 15, is “moving away from accountability, and also just wasting resources and throwing away a whole notice and comment process and years of research,” Meeta Anand, senior program director of Census and Data Equity at The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, told TPM.

“This is a huge red flag and [it] concerns me that we might be looking at not seeing the newer standards implemented on the 2030 Census, or might start seeing the standards either rolled back or no longer being implemented across the government,” Anand said.

It’s also in line with President Donald Trump’s administration’s dismantling of federal data, attempts at manipulating consequential statistical agencies and data sets, and erasing of race, ethnicity and gender identity statistics from federal data sets. A think tank closely aligned with the White House has cast SPD 15 as a “woke” product of “neo-Marxist ideologies,” and described combatting the policy as a crucial front in the White House’s efforts on redistricting and its fight against what it calls “DEI.” 

After two delays from the White House Office of Management and Budget, the Census Bureau was still poised to move forward with the new race collecting methods. It confirmed as much to TPM as recently as April. But in a supplement to a federal listing about the survey dated May 11, the Bureau reversed its stance.

“[T]he Census Bureau will use the 1997 standards in the American Community Survey and the Puerto Rico Community Survey,” the Bureau wrote in a supplement to a federal listing about the annual survey.

The Census Bureau and OMB did not respond to TPM requests for comment. 

It doesn’t make sense that the Census Bureau would delay this new policy, because it has been testing this question for more than a decade, said Meghan Maury-Fox, who served on the committee that helped create the new SPD 15 standards. 

“The stepping back from implementation on the American community survey feels like there’s no possible reason for that other than a policy priority from the administration,” Maury-Fox, a consultant who serves civil rights and social justice organizations doing data policy work, told TPM. 

The delay, they said, “feels very political to me because I know how eager Census was to get to that better data and I know how prepared they are for implementation.”

SPD 15 came about because Hispanic and Latino people, along with Middle Eastern and North African, or MENA, survey respondents, were regularly checking the “some other race” box in federal surveys. That meant researchers, policy makers, and legal experts couldn’t fully know who was where, and how various policies were or weren’t working. An update to the nearly three-decades old race and ethnicity survey standards, SPD 15 was intended to fix that information gap by merging and expanding the race and ethnicity questions for federal data gathering and eliminating the separate “Hispanic or Latino” ethnicity option. A single question would include Hispanic and Latino alongside racial options like Asian or Black. The 2024 update also added an entirely new racial category for MENA people.

Conservative groups have opposed SPD 15. The Center for Renewing America, a think tank founded by the Trump administration’s current OMB director Russ Vought, released a document on SPD 15 on May 26, 2026, two weeks after the Census Bureau delayed it, declaring that the “woke and weaponized agenda of the ruling class presents an existential threat to the American republic.” It described SPD 15 as “a more elaborate apparatus for classifying citizens by race, and that apparatus remains the foundation on which state-sanctioned racism is built.”

The document tied SPD 15 to both DEI and redistricting. “DEI offices cannot impose racial targets and racially drawn congressional districts cannot be defended in court without an authoritative federal scheme that first sorts Americans into the relevant boxes,” the document said. “The post-Clinton SPD No. 15 is that scheme. The more finely it organizes the population into multiple categories, the more grievances can be generated, the more woke programs can be promulgated, and the more aggressively the government can be primed to engineer outcomes predicated on race essentialism.”

The Center for Renewing America did not respond to TPM questions asking whether this document was in line with OMB’s thinking. OMB also did not respond to TPM questions about its awareness and use of this document.

Project 2025 also targeted SPD 15 for “review.” 

“A new conservative Administration should take control of this process and thoroughly review any changes,” Project 2025 authors wrote. “There are concerns among conservatives that the data under Biden Administration proposals could be skewed to bolster progressive political agendas.”

Early signs of a slowdown of SPD 15 implementation came nine months into Trump’s second term, when the Office of Management and Budget in September extended the timeline for implementing the rule from September 2025 to March 2026. Then, in March, OMB pushed the deadline again, this time an additional year to March 2027. 

But even after two delays under an administration that continues to be openly hostile to both federal data science and issues of race and ethnicity, advocates were cautiously optimistic the rule they’d studied and advocated for over more than a decade would be implemented in time for the 2027 ACS. 

The Census Bureau in April pointed TPM to a 2024 blog post on its website, published under the Biden administration, affirming the use of the new race standards for the 2027 ACS specifically. 

Not long after, the agency quietly issued what Anand described as a “reversal.”

Data affected by this rollback could have an influence on the way in which states redraw maps while redistricting, and the way in which voting rights advocates fight maps they believe to be discriminatory. Granular race and ethnicity data has become a tool for mapmakers seeking to create political boundaries that maximize their advantage, a trend that has only been supercharged since the Supreme Court handed down Louisiana v. Callais, eroding the Voting Rights Act. “It is not a coincidence that this delay is happening at a time when Republicans across the country are working overtime to pass gerrymanders that silence millions of voters, particularly voters of color,” Marina Jenkins, executive director at the National Redistricting Foundation, told TPM in an email in October, describing the delays as “troubling.”

The data is also used for a host of other purposes that affect people’s daily lives. Community planners rely on it to make sure proposed public transportation changes don’t disproportionately limit access for certain groups. The data was used to reveal that Black and Latino communities had less uptake of SNAP benefits than would be expected based on the share of people who would qualify, Maury-Fox told TPM. More granular data would help researchers better understand why — perhaps there are language barriers affecting particular ethnic minorities, for example — and work to address that disparity.

Denice Ross oversaw the SPD 15 creation process as the U.S. Chief Data Scientist under Biden. She told TPM in April that while all data are political to a degree, the government’s updated race and ethnicity guidelines used a solid methodological process that she believes would “survive any review.” 

“Federal statistics are not supposed to be subject to politicization by design,” said Ross. “I closely watched the SPD 15 the process of creating those revisions and I was on the political side and we were really clear not to cross that line.”

“Certainly the federal data landscape has changed a lot in the current administration,” Ross continued, “and we have seen patterns where data have been removed because they don’t align with the administration’s priorities.”