Our nation’s Founding Fathers instituted the national census as a count of all people, an enumeration that is the basis of federal funding, the distribution of political representation among the states and even private sector decisions, such as whether to open a store in a community.
Those reasons should cry out for accurate counts. But after more than two years of political meddling from the White House in the census process, the Supreme Court, without giving a reason, allowed the Trump administration to stop the 2020 census count before it was scheduled to end on Oct. 31.
Even without a pandemic limiting personal interactions, getting an accurate count is daunting. So that’s why the Census Bureau extended the deadline from Aug. 15 to Oct. 31.
The abrupt shutdown of the count about two weeks early probably will not make a major difference in the outcome. However, that misses a bigger point: Counting all who live within our borders should be a nonpartisan data collection exercise conducted without political interference.
All of us should be angry. If the census isn’t accurate, then the country has to live with the consequences until the next count takes place 10 years from now. States and cities that have experienced explosive population growth in the past 10 years won’t have that growth fully reflected in their share of federal funding, political representation and countless other services. More than 75% of the $1.5 trillion in federal funding allocated to the states based on census goes to Medicare and Medicaid, according to some estimates.
Texas, which has added residents faster than any other state in the past decade, might not see that growth reflected in additional seats in Congress. Failing to count just 1% of the people in Texas would cost the state $300 million in federal funding per year for the next 10 years. And we already know that communities with large numbers of Black or Hispanic residents, immigrants, low-income households and children under 18 have been undercounted previously.
The chaos of this census can be placed at the feet of the Trump administration, starting with a misguided attempt to add a citizenship question into the census, a ham-handed move that civil liberty organizations criticized as an attempt to discourage immigrants in the country legally or illegally from participating in the count. The administration compounded matters by ending data collection early and by seeking to exclude all immigrants without legal documentation from the census reapportionment process used to determine congressional representation and district lines.
These roadblocks were erected for partisan purposes. This nation should be able to complete the census count in good faith without partisan manipulation. When that doesn’t happen, the politicians win, and average folks who need services lose.
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