The presidency that celebrated “alternative facts” may be over. But those “alternative facts” may still poison the country for the next decade.
Unless, that is, the government acts swiftly to ensure that the recently completed decennial census is not tainted by the Trump era.
No census is easy, but the 2020 Census faced unusual challenges: Much of the population growth over the past decade has been among groups whom demographers consider “hard to count” (immigrants, people of color, others with low survey-response rates). Then came covid-19, which complicated in-person outreach and follow-ups. Knocking on doors or trying to extract information from nursing homes became especially difficult amid a pandemic.
Then, the Trump administration piled on.
Last year, Trump officials kept changing plans for census field work, ending such operations earlier than scheduled. Worse, President Donald Trump repeatedly attempted to politicize the census. He tried to jam through a new question on citizenship. He ordered granular counts of noncitizens and tried to exclude undocumented immigrants from the official population tallies.
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