This month’s Fellows’ Corner is written by demographer and sociologist Rogelio Sáenz, our 2023 Ernest W. Burgess Fellow.
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The Disbanding of Census Advisory Committees: Likely Consequences
In recent decades, the U.S. Census Bureau has been increasingly invoked in our nation’s political discourse, and it is now a target of the politically motivated closures and layoffs that have been initiated by President Trump. Its three advisory committees were abruptly terminated at the end of February, and details about the committees’ upcoming meetings on the Census Bureau’s website have since been replaced with a single terse statement: “The Census Bureau currently has no advisory committees.”
Despite the initial shock felt by the members of these committees (I was one of them), the Trump administration’s move did not come as a major surprise, given that it has abolished scientific advisory committees that have long advised other federal agencies. The existence and work of these kinds of committees are not radical propositions, despite the administration framing them as such: It is a customary and wise practice for the government to ask knowledgeable people with relevant specialized expertise to assess new initiatives and programs before those initiatives and programs are executed. Indeed, doing so honors one of our democracy’s ideals: publicly engaging the citizenry in its institutions.
Until the end of February, the U.S. Census Bureau had three Census Advisory Committees:
- 2030 Census Advisory Committee (2030 CAC), which “reviewed and provided feedback related to 2030 Census plans”;
- Census Scientific Advisory Committee (CSAC), which advised the Census Bureau “on new challenges including, adaptive design, cyber infrastructure, demographic, economic and statistical research and other priorities”; and
- National Advisory Committee (NAC), which helped the Census Bureau “reach racial, ethnic, and other populations—aging, immigrant, rural, tribal, etc.—and those affected by natural disasters.”
All three of these committees consisted of members who had been carefully vetted to ensure that they had the expertise and appropriate credentials to provide recommendations on the Census Bureau’s policies, methodology, communications, and other operational aspects. As a demographer, I had the pleasure of serving on the Census Scientific Advisory Committee (CSAC) over the past three years and had wholeheartedly agreed to another three-year term a couple of months ago. Unfortunately, a series of unexpected announcements sent to CSAC members in February augured the demise of our committee. They began with smaller changes (removing our biographies from the CSAC website and replacing an upcoming in-person meeting with a virtual one), but the final blow soon came: the official announcement that our committee’s purpose “had been fulfilled” and was no longer needed. Members of the two other committees were notified of their termination in a similarly abrupt fashion.
This was not a new plan devised after Trump’s inauguration; indeed, it had already been part of Project 2025, the Republican Party’s official plan to take over the U.S. government. Trump’s assertion on the 2024 presidential campaign trail that he had never heard of Project 2025 was disproven after it was revealed that his vice-presidential candidate, J.D. Vance, had written the foreword to the project’s manifesto, Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise. Published by the Heritage Foundation, the nearly 900-page document includes many steps that have since been carried out by the second Trump administration, including the disbanding of the Census Advisory Committees:
Abolish the National Advisory Committee and reevaluate all other committees. The Census Bureau National Advisory Committee on Racial, Ethnic, and Other Populations (NAC) […] is a hotbed for left-wing activists intent upon injecting racial and social-justice theory into the governing philosophy of the Census Bureau [and] should immediately be abolished by the incoming Administration. […] The new Administration should also reevaluate and potentially abolish all non-statutory standing committees within the Census Bureau, including the Census Scientific Advisory Committee. (682)
The CSAC’s charter describes itself as “solely […] an advisory body” and its members as specialists from “demographics, economics, geography, psychology, statistics, survey methodology, social and behavioral sciences, information technology, computer science and engineering, marketing, and other fields of expertise, as appropriate”—hardly the group of dangerous subversives depicted by Project 2025. But beyond my dismay at this unjustified characterization, I worry about the potentially catastrophic consequences of disbanding these advisory committees, especially since it removes guardrails to protect democracy and ensure the accurate counting of the general public. Among Project 2025’s initiatives for the upcoming 2030 census are the following:
- Review the partnership program. This program, designed to promote responsiveness to the census by employing trusted voices in various communities, deserves careful scrutiny. A new Administration should work to actively engage with conservative groups and voices to promote [sic] response to the decennial census. […] In 2020, lack of conservative participation was one factor in an undercount in some areas of the country, affecting representation of certain states.
- Add a citizenship question. Despite finding that the Trump Administration’s addition of the citizenship question to the 2020 decennial census violated the Administration Procedures Act, the Supreme Court held that the Secretary of Commerce does have broad authority to add a citizenship question to the decennial census. Any successful conservative Administration must include a citizenship question in the census. Asking a citizenship question is considered best practice even by the United Nations. […]
- Review forthcoming changes to race and ethnicity questions. The [Biden] Administration has announced its intent to change data collection methods regarding race and ethnicity by combining two questions on the decennial questionnaire and increasing the number of available options. A new conservative Administration should take control of this process and thoroughly review any changes. There are concerns among conservatives that under the Biden Administration proposals could be skewed to bolster [sic] progressive political agenda. Government data should be unbiased and trusted—and an incoming conservative Administration should ensure that is the case. (680–681)
There is much to unpack here, but the bottom line is that these changes are intended to reduce the count of people of color in the 2030 census by deterring their participation. Adding the citizenship question is likely to scare undocumented immigrants and their U.S.-citizen family members out of responding, and eliminating outreach partnerships with community organizations will disproportionately affect participation among people of color. Despite the stated goal of promoting participation to improve the accuracy of “various” communities’ numbers, the ultimate goal of these efforts seems to be to undermine the statistical truth of demographic growth among of people of color (especially Latinos and Asians) and to overrepresent an aging white population that is now in decline (despite Project 2025’s accusations of anti-white bias and undercounting). In fact, the U.S.’s white population is expected to shrink even more as a result of the Office of Management and Budget’s Statistical Policy Directive No. 15, which will create a new racial category in the 2030 census for people of Middle Eastern and Northern African (MENA) origin, who had previously been instructed to select the “white” racial category.
Making sweeping decisions about the administration of the census without the technical expertise and guidance of seasoned researchers will likely result in significant inaccuracies in the 2030 census that may have far-reaching effects on already-underfunded communities of color.
The Census Advisory Committees were established to give leading experts from a variety of fields the opportunity to improve the decennial census by evaluating its programs, ongoing surveys, and changes in methodologies and data collection. Characterizing this group of thoroughly vetted, highly qualified individuals as a “hotbed for left-wing activists intent upon injecting racial and social-justice theory into the governing philosophy of the Census Bureau” is an unsubstantiated exaggeration that conceals the Trump administration’s ongoing project of eliminating scientific voices that might challenge its efforts to erode our democracy.
—Rogelio Sáenz, 2023 Ernest W. Burgess Fellow
