Leadership at the Census Bureau has ordered staff to halt all external events related to the 2030 Census amid the agency’s release of a controversial, unprecedented rule proposal aimed at excluding immigrants from the U.S. population count, according to a copy of an email obtained by TPM.
The events moratorium is set to last until the end of the 30-day public comment period allotted for the sweeping proposal, which seeks to transform how the U.S. Census defines “usual residence” and end the collection of race and ethnicity data for the first time since the Census began in 1790. The email also instructed Census employees to write a memo justifying their participation in any events, including those unrelated to the 2030 Census. Staff were instructed to justify their participation in any events to “George, Michael and John,” referring to George Cook, acting Census Bureau director, Michael Lachanski, Census Bureau deputy director for Data, Policy, and Science, and John Studds, Census Bureau deputy director for for Administration and Operations, according to a current Census Bureau employee who was not authorized to speak to the media.
“It is highly unusual to blanket deprive the public of access to Census professionals at any time,” John Abowd, former chief scientist at the U.S. Census Bureau, told TPM.
The Census Bureau, Commerce Department and White House did not respond to TPM requests for comment.
Census staff were also informed last Friday that they would be required to justify their participation in an annual research conference just one week before the conference was set to begin. Several panelists along with the conference’s keynote speaker are Census Bureau employees.
“[T]here will not be discussions of Census Bureau-specific operations,” a person involved in organizing the conference told TPM. “There have been no issues with Census Bureau employees attending.”
The abrupt ban on decennial census-related events comes after the Bureau has taken several eyebrow-raising actions including: unexpectedly banning a data privacy technique called differential privacy after a far-right campaign targeted the statistical method,; publishing an anonymously-authored report alleging instances of noncitizens voting using data that experts have said was likely inaccurate, and putting political appointees on a previously apolitical internal research committee.
The Bureau’s residency rule, its banning of differential privacy, and its shoddy so-called noncitizen voting report come as the Trump administration has pushed to politicize operations at a range of government agencies ahead of the midterms.
The Census Bureau intends to exclude most immigrants from the 10-year population count, according to language in its proposed rule. The Bureau is also considering the addition of an immigration status question to the 2030 Census. Since the 10-year population count is used to determine how many congressional representatives each state gets, a process called apportionment, Republicans have long sought to exclude certain immigrants from the count, which they believe will help add representation to red states and siphon power from blue ones.
Before the moratorium on events began, Census Bureau officials spoke at a statistical conference and acknowledged that the Russell Vought-led Office of Management and Budget was involved in architecting the controversial new rule.
Vought founded the Center for Renewing America, a right-wing organization that has advocated for excluding immigrants from data used for apportionment and redistricting, decried differential privacy, and called on the Commerce Department to ban the statistical method.
On Tuesday, Wired reported that several members of another right-wing think tank, the Trump-aligned America First Policy Institute (AFPI), are currently on staff at the Census Bureau with access to sensitive data. At least two of those AFPI employees helped author the noncitizen voting report, Wired found.
Russel Vought really, really needs to go through something post DonOLD II.