Campaign Action
The Trump administration didn’t win its Supreme Court case to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census, so it’s risking a delay of the entire census to try to go back for a do-over. The administration had set a Monday deadline for beginning to print census materials, and NPR reports on signs that the process hasn’t started.
The Office of Management and Budget hasn’t formally approved the materials, and a case is going forward in a Maryland federal court challenging the citizenship question again in light of new evidence that it was racially motivated from the beginning.
The Supreme Court had basically given the Trump administration a road map to come back for a second shot at the citizenship question and get permission, but the racial discrimination angle could complicate that, and that effort would take time that the administration has claimed it does not have before the printing must begin. The census is supposed to be rolled out in January in rural Alaska before making its way to the rest of the country.
“The longer you delay, the more you're going to have to condense the schedule and the more expensive it's going to be and the greater the chance for errors to crop up,” said former Census Bureau Director John Thompson.