According to reports, the Census Bureau will miss its year-end deadline for the first time since the December 31 date was set by Congress 40 years ago.
If the office does not deliver the numbers used to determine the congressional districts, President Trump
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An unauthorized anonymous source from the Census Bureau on Tuesday confirmed the expected delay in the AP. The media reports that documents obtained in early December showed that office officials did not expect to have the numbers ready until after the president-elect Joe Biden
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After taking office, Biden will have the ability to rescind Trump’s directive that excluded people from the country without permission to be considered when allocating the number of seats in the state Congress, the AP notes. Aside from deciding how many seats in the House each state gets, the census also determines how federal funds are distributed.
Terri Ann Lowenthal, a former congressional official specializing in census issues, told the AP, “The delay suggests the census office needs more time to ensure the accuracy of census numbers for all states.”
As the AP points out, the census office is legally required to hand over population figures to the president at the end of the year, but there is no penalty if the office fails to meet the deadline.
The December 31 deadline was less than a century ago, and according to a historian who spoke to the AP, the census worked well before it had a deadline.
Historian Margo Anderson of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee said: “It has not been a very controversial issue until this year, the year of a pandemic and the Trump administration gave up its goals and its efforts to remove undocumented people from the distribution count. “
She added: “They’re still trying to fight the numbers to get something that looks right.”
In October, the Supreme Court heeded the Trump administration’s request to end the census count earlier this year. The administration stated that the previous completion date was necessary for the Bureau to meet its year-end deadline. Critics argued that the previous ending would negatively affect minority communities that had not been counted.
The 2020 census count has faced several challenges, notes AP, which is struggling to operate during a pandemic, the scarcity of recruitment and an administration that has repeatedly reversed its planned targets.
The demands and personal accounts of census workers claimed this year that accountants were pressured to falsify data and use alternative counting methods that were inaccurate. Many workers, under pressure from supervisors to fill out as many forms as possible, resorted to guessing how many people lived in some households.