A federal judge barred the Trump administration from ending the census count a month early, issuing a temporary injunction late Thursday that prevents the government from halting the census-taking on Sept. 30, a full month before the Oct. 31 congressionally approved extended deadline. The Trump administration had itself requested an extension in April because of disruptions due to the pandemic, but in July reversed course without explanation, as Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross directed the count to be completed early. Judge Lucy Koh of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California halted the abbreviated timeframe, while also ruling that the extended deadline of April 2021 for the data to be sent to the White House also be upheld.
“The ruling came after evidence filed this week showed that top Census Bureau officials believed ending the head count early would seriously endanger its accuracy,” the New York Times reports. “In one July email, the head of census field operations, Timothy P. Olson Jr., called it ‘ludicrous’ to think a curtailed population count would succeed. A second internal document drafted in late July said a shortened census would have ‘fatal data flaws that are unacceptable for a constitutionally mandated national activity.’”
The Justice Department, and the Trump administration as a whole, have tried to portray their effort to complete the census and report the data by the end of the year as a good faith effort to comply with the law. The Trump administration’s tactics, however, are suspected of being an intentional effort to subvert the spirit of the law, and the census itself, which is entrusted with getting an accurate count of the country so that it can be governed fairly and effectively. The last people to be included in the census are usually marginalized groups that take more time and effort to account for; those are also groups that aren’t typically in the Republican Party’s wheelhouse. So the Trump White House, the thinking goes, would rather rush through an intentionally flawed, inaccurate count because it would likely be to its advantage—by undercounting people and places that do not support it—when allocating congressional districts and federal funding for the next decade. Judge Koh writes in her opinion, even as the Trump administration has pushed to rush the count through, “[the] facts show not only that the Bureau could not meet the statutory deadline, but also that the Bureau had received pressure from the Commerce Department to cease seeking an extension of the deadline.”
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