A proposed change to a key tax form could help the Trump administration achieve new anti-immigrant policy objectives, including preventing undocumented immigrants from receiving federal tax benefits. But it could also be used to accomplish a more sweeping objective: Shifting the balance of power in Congress by excluding many classes of immigrants from apportionment, the process through which power in the House of Representatives is allocated.
A draft of the 2026 IRS Form 1040, made public this month, adds a citizenship and work authorization question for the first time in history. The question asks filers to check “yes” or “no” on a question which asks: “At the time you file your return, are you, and your spouse if filing jointly, a U.S. citizen, U.S. national, or an alien lawfully authorized to work in the U.S.?”
The new question comes alongside another proposed first: The Census Bureau for the first time has proposed using tax information to identify where, geographically, a census respondent should be considered a resident.
Form 1040, experts told TPM, is one of the primary administrative records the Census Bureau relies on to fill in gaps during its 10-year population count.
The IRS change represents an additional way President Donald Trump’s administration has sought to weaponize a broad range of federal agencies in its quest to identify, deport, or otherwise alienate immigrants, including undocumented people. The change is also designed to enable the agency to cut tax incentives, including the child tax credit, for most immigrants.
TPM published internal deliberations between officials at the Treasury Department and the Commerce Department, under which the Census Bureau exists, that show Treasury officials pushing back on Commerce’s plans to rely almost exclusively on tax records to ascertain a person’s “usual residence.”
This IRS draft form suggests that maybe Treasury has found a way to fall in line.
The Treasury Department and the IRS did not immediately respond to TPM requests for comment. The Census Bureau also did not respond to a TPM request for comment. And the White House did not immediately respond to questions from TPM about the origins of this policy.
Census in early September published plans to redefine how the 10-year census tracks where people live. Rather than using the 2020 definition of a person’s “usual residence” — “the place where they live and sleep most of the time” — the Bureau narrowed the definition of a person’s usual residence to something “consistent with, and evidenced by, their tax records.” Under the proposed plans, the Bureau would exclude immigrants except lawful permanent residents from the population count, which is used to determine how many congressional representatives and Electoral College votes each state receives. The Census proposal would also end the collection of race and ethnicity data on the census.
Immediately, experts flagged practical issues with using tax information for usual residence. Namely, government data including tax records are usually not of a high enough quality to use for the 10-year census population count, called enumeration. , Cristina Tello-Trillo, a former senior economist at the U.S. Census Bureau, told TPM.
While at the Bureau, Tello-Trillo, who is now the chief economist at the left-leaning Center for American Progress think tank, co-authored a working paper about the use of administrative records collected by the government — including IRS tax forms — for the enumeration. The IRS Form 1040, Tello-Trillo said, “is one of the main sources for the administrative records roster.” If the Census Bureau proposal is approved, the Bureau would potentially rely on information from the 1040 for enumeration, Tello-Trillo said.
“Note that only 43% of all U.S. addresses have an [administrative] record roster,” Tello-Trillo told TPM, referring to the working paper’s findings, “so relying only on [administrative] records would give us information on fewer than half of all U.S. households.”
Under Trump, the Census Bureau has initiated several seemingly politically-motivated policy changes, including removing language banning political interference from the agency’s scientific integrity policy, adding political appointees to a formerly non-political research committee, and publishing a noncitizen voter analysis that Jed Kolko, senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, told TPM “departed sharply” from Bureau norms. Kolko was formerly the Under Secretary for Economic Affairs at the Commerce Department where he helped oversee the Census Bureau and the Bureau of Economic Affairs.
“In other administrations something like that noncitizen voting brief might’ve been published by a political office,” said Kolko, who added his former office published data analyses. “And it was very clear that they were authored by the Office of the Under Secretary for Economic Affairs, not by scientific or technical research staff at a statistical agency.”
In attempting to remove most immigrants from enumeration and congressional apportionment, the Trump administration is working to accomplish a long-time Republican goal of counting only U.S. citizens in order to shift political power to red states.
While some conservative states like Texas and Florida have large immigrant populations, Republicans believe immigrants are more likely to live in blue states with friendlier immigration policies.
With large swaths of the midwest having much smaller populations of undocumented immigrants, California demographer Walter Schwarm told TPM excluding certain immigrants from apportionment is “probably a net red benefit.”
