President Donald Trump is going after the census again. In a Thursday post on his social media platform Truth Social, the president announced that he’d “instructed” the Commerce Department to redo the census based on the 2024 election results to ensure that “people who are in our country illegally” wouldn’t be counted.
Redistricting experts were quick to point out that such a move would be unconstitutional, as the census is required to be conducted every decade and include “all free persons.” (During Trump’s first term, the Supreme Court blocked the administration’s request to put a citizenship question on the census). But the announcement speaks to how Trump’s crusade against immigrants and other vulnerable groups threatens to fundamentally interfere with accurate data collection and reporting.
Much of Trump’s war on data has focused on what he derogatorily calls “woke” policy, or data related to race, gender, and ethnicity. He banned the use of that data in federal hiring, for example, as part of his administration’s broader effort to eliminate DEI programs outright.
Experts tell TPM that Trump’s data drain puts the most vulnerable Americans at risk, as changes in demographic data collection and reporting could mean less efficient public policy for immigrants, Black people and people of color, gender minorities, lower-income Americans, and other historically disadvantaged populations. Unknown problems can’t be fixed.
“The most dangerous trickle down effect of this,” said Abby André, director of a data-driven policy tracker called The Impact Project, “is less effective economic policy. And those most in need among us are always hit first.”
Dedrick Asante-Muhammad is president at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, which tracks and recommends policy regarding the racial wealth gap, income inequity and unemployment. He said racial distinctions in economic data are important. While national unemployment is 4.2% according to the most recent Bureau of Labor Statics report, unemployment for Black people reached 7.2% in July — the highest rate since a pandemic-era economic slowdown in October 2021. That stands in contrast to the unemployment for white people, which has held steady at around 3.7%.
“So the 4% number does not accurately represent unemployment across all communities,” Asante-Muhammad said. “Obviously those which have the most economic insecurity are those who will have the most negative effects by not having policy to assist them,” he continued.
Trump responded to the overall low jobs numbers in the July report by firing BLS Commissioner Erika McEntarfer.
When Trump and Elon Musk took a chainsaw to federal employment, slashing government jobs known for hiring Black people at a disproportionately higher rate than private industry, researchers waited to see if certain demographic groups would be hit hardest. The Office of Personnel Management maintained a database tracking the race and gender of federal employees. Until Trump came into office, officials took that database down, and republished it after deleting data on race and ethnicity.
Hayley Brown, a research associate at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, listed the ways non-economic federal data has been compromised since Trump took office. There’s the plan to end an Environmental Protection Agency report collecting greenhouse gas data, a rollback of hospital reporting on COVID rates, and U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio redefining human rights “in a way limiting the amount of information we can get,” Brown said.
Trump’s deluge of anti-DEI executive orders, Brown continued, “is getting rid of variables like gender, race, and ethnicity, which means the data is less useful in general and it’s less able to accurately reflect the community that they’re serving.”
Former U.S. Census Bureau Director Robert Santos told NPR in February that the bureau stopped collecting gender identity data on its National Crime Victimization Survey and a survey tracking sexual assault and harrassment in prisons to comply with one of Trump’s Inauguration Day executive orders. These changes came despite data from the Bureau of Justice Statistics showing trans people were 2.5 times more likely to be victims of violent crime. That report is still available on the bureau’s website.
While experts retain trust in the civil servants and statisticians still working for the federal government, some envisioned scenarios in which the Trump administration’s erasure of demographics like race and gender could inadvertently taint data.
“You can’t do modern polling,” said Richard Fry, a senior researcher and economist at Pew Research, “if you don’t have those federal benchmarks to tell you what the U.S. adult population looks like in terms of gender, race, ethnicity, who’s a citizen, who’s not a citizen… My polling colleagues heavily rely on that and so does every large scale polling outlet.”
Republican lawmakers have in the past openly expressed a desire to cut data about populations with the worst outcomes. When addressing Louisiana’s maternal mortality rate — the fourth worst in the nation — Republican Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-LA) in 2022 said one could simply ignore Black women’s outcomes to improve maternal mortality rate.
“[I]f you correct our population for race, we’re not as much of an outlier as it’d otherwise appear,” Cassidy told Politico.
The Trump administration’s assault on information and the civil servants who provide it threatens to have long-term impacts that are difficult to undo, said Paul Schroeder, a statistician and executive director of the Council of Professional Associations on Federal Statistics.
“There’s really real world consequences of attempting to mess with these data that it’s going to be hard to recover from,” said Schroeder. “This is really a grave error on the Trump administration’s part and I wish it would not have occurred.”
