The Trump Administration is proposing making changes to the U.S. census that could have a sweeping—and unequal—impact on the federal funding and congressional representation that states receive.
The proposals, which still need to go through an approval process before being enacted, were publicly shared by the Administration earlier this week. In the document, the Trump Administration proposes excluding people who are not U.S. citizens and don’t have permanent residency from the census count. It also proposes barring census officials from including some demographic questions, such as ones about race, ethnicity, and sexual orientation, in the questionnaire.
If the changes are approved, they would upend the federal government’s understanding of the country’s population, which would have cascading effects on the resources allocated to certain states.
Here’s what to know about the census, the proposed changes, and which states could be impacted most heavily by the proposals.
What is the census?
The U.S. census takes place every 10 years, as required by the Constitution. The purpose of the census is to count every person residing in the U.S. The results are then used to help allot the appropriate number of seats to each state in the House of Representatives, as well as to redraw electoral districts. The federal government also uses the data collected in the official count to help decide how to allocate funding to states.
The next census will take place in 2030.
What are Trump’s proposed changes to the census?
The Trump Administration is proposing that census officials add a question related to citizenship to the questionnaire, and exclude people who are undocumented immigrants and non-citizens without permanent resident status in the official count. That would mean that immigrants who are in the country legally but do not have green cards would not be included in the tally.
“Illegal aliens (among others) should not be included in the apportionment count, as they are not true inhabitants, members of the body politic, or persons with a ‘usual residence’ in the United States due to their lack of a sufficient tie and allegiance to the United States,” the Administration argued in the document shared online this week.
The Trump Administration is also suggesting barring census officials from including certain demographic questions, such as ones about race, ethnicity, and sexual orientation, on the questionnaire. The Administration argued that the official tally “should be colorblind and should not be distorted in any way by questions about immaterial personal characteristics.” It also claimed that “the (potentially) sensitive nature of questions about race, ethnicity, and sexual orientation,” as well as “the reduced need for or usefulness of this information” were other reasons it was suggesting excluding the topics from the national survey.
The census has included questions about race and ethnicity since the very first count in 1790.
These proposed changes are expected to be met with legal challenges. Many politicians, advocates, and experts have previously objected to the suggestion of excluding topics such as race and ethnicity from the survey.
“If you change what the census counts, then you change where the money can help most,” two staffers working in federal data policy for the Federation of American Scientists wrote in a post on the group’s website. “Removing race and ethnicity from federal forms and surveys would leave the country unable to measure who is getting sick and dying at higher rates, unable to direct prevention programs to the communities carrying the heaviest burden, and unable to tell whether any of it is working as intended.”
“Removing race and ethnicity data does not make health disparities go away,” the post continued. “It merely makes them harder to find, harder to measure, and harder to fix.”
Which states could be most impacted if the proposed changes go into effect?
If the proposed changes are approved and go into effect for the upcoming 2030 census, they would have a disproportionate impact on certain states—for instance, ones that have larger populations of undocumented immigrants and non-citizens without permanent residency.
According to the Pew Research Center, the six states that had “the largest unauthorized immigrant populations” in 2023 were California, with 2.3 million; Texas, with 2.1 million; Florida, with 1.6 million; New York, with 825,000; New Jersey, with 600,000; and Illinois, with 550,000. The term “unauthorized immigrant” includes undocumented immigrants as well as some immigrants who have authorization to live or work in the country—for instance, asylum applicants and Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) recipients are included in that label.
If the proposed census changes take effect, then those six states—as well as others with a large number of undocumented immigrants and non-citizens without permanent residency—could lose seats in the House of Representatives, as well as experience cuts in federal funding, as a result of the exclusion of hundreds of thousands or even millions of their residents from the count.
The post How Trump’s Proposed Census Changes Could Impact States’ Funding—and Political Power appeared first on TIME.
