Trump officials interfered with the 2020 census beyond cutting it short, email shows – By Hansi Lo Wang (NPR) / January 15, 2022
Former President Donald Trump’s administration alarmed career civil servants at the Census Bureau by not only ending the 2020 national head count early, but also pressuring them to alter plans for protecting people’s privacy and producing accurate data, a newly released email shows.
Trump’s political appointees at the Commerce Department, which oversees the bureau, demonstrated an “unusually” high level of “engagement in technical matters, which is unprecedented relative to the previous censuses,” according to a September 2020 email that Ron Jarmin — the bureau’s deputy director — sent to two other top civil servants.
At the time, the administration was faced with the reality that if Trump lost the November election he could also lose a chance to change the census numbers used to redistribute political representation. The window of opportunity was closing for his administration to attempt to radically reshape the futures of the U.S. House of Representatives and the Electoral College.
Despite the 14th Amendment’s requirement to include the “whole number of persons in each state,” Trump wanted to exclude unauthorized immigrants from the census counts used to reallocate each state’s share of congressional seats and electoral votes.
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