New questions on a census form would have to be vetted by Congress and a U.S. Census Bureau director couldn’t be fired without cause under proposed legislation that attempts to prevent in the future the type of political interference into the nation’s 2020 head count that took place during the Trump administration.
The legislation introduced this week in the U.S. House of Representatives would put in place roadblocks against attempted political meddling in the once-a-decade census that determines how many congressional seats each state gets and the distribution of $1.5 trillion in federal spending each year, according to U.S. Rep. Carolyn Maloney, D-N.Y., the bill’s sponsor.
“”The census is a foundation of American democracy, and it must be protected from partisan interference,” said Maloney, the chair of the House Committee on Oversight and Reform, which was holding a hearing on the bill Thursday.
In the years leading up to the 2020 census, the Trump administration unsuccessfully tried to add a citizenship question to the census questionnaire, a move that advocates feared would scare off Hispanics and immigrants from participating, whether they were in the country legally or not. The Supreme Court blocked the question.
The Trump administration also unsuccessfully tried to get the Census Bureau to exclude people in the country illegally from population figures used for divvying up congressional seats among the states, also called the apportionment numbers.