Is the census doomed under Trump administration?

Amid all the craziness in the past month, you might be forgiven for failing to notice the May 9 resignation of Census Director John Thompson. Thompson stepped down without any explanation. Most media coverage of his resignation has revolved around Congress’s reluctance to increase funding for the census to the level Thompson would have liked.

Yet, perhaps because everyone is just so agitated about everything right now, it is natural to tie the census in to anxieties about the meaning that the Trump presidency holds. Is it possible we just won’t count people this time around? Is there some sort of plan not to count certain kinds of people?

{mosads}Census politics have always been with us, and they have always served as a platform for American anxieties about social science, race, and the role of the federal government in our lives. It is, I think, important for us all to think about these conflicts in a reasoned way, and to shut out that little voice in our heads that keeps saying Trump, Trump, Trump … .

Before we get to the various anxieties about the 2020 census, a bit of history is in order. Although Congress and the Census Bureau have squabbled a bit of late over how much the census costs, it is not the sort of governmental program that can just be cut.

The census is mandated by the Constitution (Article I, Section 2); it also mandates that any tax levied by Congress on the states be proportional to its population (Article I, Section 9). Although most American taxes don’t work this way, this second provision has generally been taken as a directive to conduct as accurate a count as possible.

Historically, there have been two major areas of controversy regarding the census. One has to do with how much effort we put into finding people to count. There has always been conflict over how hard the bureau should work to find people who either don’t want to be found or can’t easily be found by conventional means.

This has generally been taken to mean homeless people and others living “off the grid.” For many years the government has spent money on advertising for the census, to assure people of the benefits to them of being counted and to reassure them that census data cannot be used to punish.

Yet this raises the question of how much money should be spent simply trying to find people; in theory, lavish sums of money could be spent looking in out-of-the-way places for people who may or may not be there. There are legitimate questions about how much of an effort should be made, and where that effort should be made.

Another area of controversy has been the matter of what to ask people on the census. The Constitution merely directs the federal government to enumerate people, something that is necessary in order to apportion and draw congressional districts.

The internet is full of all sorts of websites encouraging people not to answer census questions or alleging various violations of people’s rights when faced with census questions. Yet the Supreme Court has generally deferred to the Census Bureau regarding the bureau’s right to pose a wide range of questions. The bureau has at times responded to public sentiment about what should and should not be asked, however.

Many federal programs also use census data on income or other characteristics to determine how and where federal funds should be spent. Even for those who dislike means-tested programs like the school lunch program, it seems uncontroversial that if we are going to have these programs we should have federal data that shows where this money should and should not be spent.

The same goes for language-based programs such as bilingual balloting. Many other questions, however, have more to do with how we understand ourselves as a nation than with how we spend our money.

Racial categories have changed over the years, and many questions asked on the contemporary census — to pick one notable example, questions about sexuality and sexual behavior — have more to do with what we as a society value measuring accurately than with how we target federal programs. Social scientists and academics like to have this information, but that doesn’t mean it’s necessary.

Both of these subjects have the capacity to become more charged than usual in today’s political environment. The 2020 census will inevitably say some things about changes in the racial composition of the country.

Given the role race and immigration played in 2016, many people will seize upon these changes to score points. The Trump administration’s attitude toward science and social science is likely also to influence how the census questions are discussed. That is, any flaws will be seen as deliberate, and for every finding of the changing economic and social characteristics of the country, there will be attempts to dispute the census accuracy.

Of course, by the time we know any of these things, there’s a chance that Donald Trump will no longer be president. Yet the legacy of his administration will hang over the 2020 census. Given what we’ve learned about Trump’s reading habits, I can’t imagine that he has devoted much time to thinking about the census.

It’s easy to let the havoc that has engulfed the executive branch shape the way we think about every governmental decision. However, the issues involved in the seemingly straightforward task of counting people are worthy of our consideration.

Perhaps the path to sanity at the moment lies in thinking about the competing values at stake in subjects like the census, even when the people who are supposed to be walking us through such things continue to be distracted by Trump’s early morning tweets.

Robert G. Boatright is a professor of political science at Clark University and the director of research at the National Institute for Civil Discourse.

The views expressed by contributors are their own and are not the views of The Hill.