A proposed Trump administration rule that would fundamentally rewrite how the Census defines a person’s residence was drafted so imprecisely that it fails to define its own key terms, according to a former senior bureau official who reviewed the plan.
The rule, obtained by Talking Points Memo through internal records, would replace the Census’s longstanding definition of “usual residence” — where a person “lives and sleeps most of the time” — with a standard tied to tax records and a person’s “allegiance” to the United States.
Critics say the change is designed to exclude nearly all noncitizens, aside from lawful permanent residents, from the population counts used to allot congressional seats among the states.
Amy O’Hara, a former Census Bureau executive who once led the agency’s administrative data unit and has researched using tax information in the decennial count, said the rule’s drafting reflects a lack of basic diligence.
She noted the proposal never defines the term “dependents,” despite leaning on tax concepts for its new residency standard, even though the IRS applies a specific, detailed test involving financial support to determine dependent status.
The rule also emphasizes W-2 forms as evidence of residence, O’Hara said, even though those documents are filed by individuals rather than by entire households — a mismatch given that the census is legally required to count full households, not just individual filers.
“I think it is business as usual for the administration,” said O’Hara, who now leads the Massive Data Institute at Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy. “In my experience, an agency like Census would have done a lot more editing and reading for clarity before they publish.”
Internal track changes obtained by TPM show Treasury Department officials had pushed back on Commerce’s approach, arguing that tax records should serve only as “corroborating evidence” of a person’s residence rather than a controlling factor, given how unreliable such records can be — noting they can reflect P.O. boxes, accountants’ addresses, or otherwise fail to capture a person’s actual home.
Commerce ignored that caution, insisting administrative records should be allowed to stand as sufficient evidence on their own in certain cases.
O’Hara also raised concerns about how the Bureau would handle inevitable discrepancies in administrative data, such as a name recorded with or without an apostrophe, without clear or transparent rules governing those judgment calls.
“There could be administrative data that has my name with or without the apostrophe,” she said, “and if they didn’t want to count me, they could say that there is a discrepancy there and potentially drop the records.”
Left unaddressed, she warned, such inconsistencies could produce a systematic undercount shaped by opaque internal decisions rather than public, peer-reviewed standards.
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