Activists and participants gather in front of the Supreme Court of the United States during Supreme Court re-argument of Louisiana v. Callais on October 15, 2025 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Jemal Countess/Getty Imag...Activists and participants gather in front of the Supreme Court of the United States during Supreme Court re-argument of Louisiana v. Callais on October 15, 2025 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Jemal Countess/Getty Images for Legal Defense Fund)MORE LESS
Quyen Dinh didn’t even remember that, in 2024, she was selected as one of 23 appointees to the Census 2030 Advisory Committee. The group has been disbanded since March by order of President Donald Trump, eradicating professional expertise from the planning of the decennial census.
In August, Trump said congressional Republicans “are entitled to five more seats,” in Texas, kicking off a monthslong tit-for-tat that’s seen Democrats organizing around partisan map redrawing to counter new, pro-Republican maps. Red states like Texas, Missouri and Indiana are adapting new GOP-friendly maps, while California, Virginia and other blue states are attempting to alter their own maps in response.
None of this bodes well for fair representation of minority voters, Sara Rohani, assistant counsel at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, noting thatBlack people are historically undercounted in the census.
“Fair political representation, access to government services, and effective enforcement of civil rights laws,” said Rohani, who participated in a case challenging Louisiana’s congressional map for anti-Black racial bias, “all depend on this accurate census count.”
Typically, redistricting is done every 10 years based on the results of the decennial census. But this administration is pushing states to engage in unprecedented mid-cycle redistricting now, while also delaying the implementation of SPD 15. That, in turn, could impact the 2030 census results, which could fail to capture the true diversity of America’s communities, and therefore impact how new maps are drawn in response.
In August, Trump said congressional Republicans “are entitled to five more seats,” in Texas, kicking off a monthslong tit-for-tat that’s seen Democrats organizing around partisan map redrawing to counter new, pro-Republican maps. Red states like Texas, Missouri and Indiana are adapting new GOP-friendly maps, while California, Virginia and other blue states are attempting to alter their own maps in response.
None of this bodes well for fair representation of minority voters, Sara Rohani, assistant counsel at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, noting thatBlack people are historically undercounted in the census.
“Fair political representation, access to government services, and effective enforcement of civil rights laws,” said Rohani, who participated in a case challenging Louisiana’s congressional map for anti-Black racial bias, “all depend on this accurate census count.”
The Trump team appears to be taking this advice to heart at the same time it is seeking to diminish minority communities’ political and economic power in other ways.
Typically, redistricting is done every 10 years based on the results of the decennial census. But this administration is pushing states to engage in unprecedented mid-cycle redistricting now, while also delaying the implementation of SPD 15. That, in turn, could impact the 2030 census results, which could fail to capture the true diversity of America’s communities, and therefore impact how new maps are drawn in response.
In August, Trump said congressional Republicans “are entitled to five more seats,” in Texas, kicking off a monthslong tit-for-tat that’s seen Democrats organizing around partisan map redrawing to counter new, pro-Republican maps. Red states like Texas, Missouri and Indiana are adapting new GOP-friendly maps, while California, Virginia and other blue states are attempting to alter their own maps in response.
None of this bodes well for fair representation of minority voters, Sara Rohani, assistant counsel at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, noting thatBlack people are historically undercounted in the census.
“Fair political representation, access to government services, and effective enforcement of civil rights laws,” said Rohani, who participated in a case challenging Louisiana’s congressional map for anti-Black racial bias, “all depend on this accurate census count.”
“A new conservative Administration should take control of this process and thoroughly review any changes,” the document’s authors said of the directive revisions. “There are concerns among conservatives that the data under Biden Administration proposals could be skewed to bolster progressive political agendas.”
The Trump team appears to be taking this advice to heart at the same time it is seeking to diminish minority communities’ political and economic power in other ways.
Typically, redistricting is done every 10 years based on the results of the decennial census. But this administration is pushing states to engage in unprecedented mid-cycle redistricting now, while also delaying the implementation of SPD 15. That, in turn, could impact the 2030 census results, which could fail to capture the true diversity of America’s communities, and therefore impact how new maps are drawn in response.
In August, Trump said congressional Republicans “are entitled to five more seats,” in Texas, kicking off a monthslong tit-for-tat that’s seen Democrats organizing around partisan map redrawing to counter new, pro-Republican maps. Red states like Texas, Missouri and Indiana are adapting new GOP-friendly maps, while California, Virginia and other blue states are attempting to alter their own maps in response.
None of this bodes well for fair representation of minority voters, Sara Rohani, assistant counsel at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, noting thatBlack people are historically undercounted in the census.
“Fair political representation, access to government services, and effective enforcement of civil rights laws,” said Rohani, who participated in a case challenging Louisiana’s congressional map for anti-Black racial bias, “all depend on this accurate census count.”
But Project 2025, the sweeping Heritage Foundation policy initiative that’s guiding many aspects of Trump’s second administration, directly targeted SPD 15 for “review.”
“A new conservative Administration should take control of this process and thoroughly review any changes,” the document’s authors said of the directive revisions. “There are concerns among conservatives that the data under Biden Administration proposals could be skewed to bolster progressive political agendas.”
The Trump team appears to be taking this advice to heart at the same time it is seeking to diminish minority communities’ political and economic power in other ways.
Typically, redistricting is done every 10 years based on the results of the decennial census. But this administration is pushing states to engage in unprecedented mid-cycle redistricting now, while also delaying the implementation of SPD 15. That, in turn, could impact the 2030 census results, which could fail to capture the true diversity of America’s communities, and therefore impact how new maps are drawn in response.
In August, Trump said congressional Republicans “are entitled to five more seats,” in Texas, kicking off a monthslong tit-for-tat that’s seen Democrats organizing around partisan map redrawing to counter new, pro-Republican maps. Red states like Texas, Missouri and Indiana are adapting new GOP-friendly maps, while California, Virginia and other blue states are attempting to alter their own maps in response.
None of this bodes well for fair representation of minority voters, Sara Rohani, assistant counsel at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, noting thatBlack people are historically undercounted in the census.
“Fair political representation, access to government services, and effective enforcement of civil rights laws,” said Rohani, who participated in a case challenging Louisiana’s congressional map for anti-Black racial bias, “all depend on this accurate census count.”
“SPD 15 is something we can and should and need to be doing to avoid a situation in which communities may be undercounted and continue to remain historically invisible,” said Goldstein. “The goal of SPD 15 is to change the course of history, where communities have been invisible, for political representation and in terms of resource allocation.”
But Project 2025, the sweeping Heritage Foundation policy initiative that’s guiding many aspects of Trump’s second administration, directly targeted SPD 15 for “review.”
“A new conservative Administration should take control of this process and thoroughly review any changes,” the document’s authors said of the directive revisions. “There are concerns among conservatives that the data under Biden Administration proposals could be skewed to bolster progressive political agendas.”
The Trump team appears to be taking this advice to heart at the same time it is seeking to diminish minority communities’ political and economic power in other ways.
Typically, redistricting is done every 10 years based on the results of the decennial census. But this administration is pushing states to engage in unprecedented mid-cycle redistricting now, while also delaying the implementation of SPD 15. That, in turn, could impact the 2030 census results, which could fail to capture the true diversity of America’s communities, and therefore impact how new maps are drawn in response.
In August, Trump said congressional Republicans “are entitled to five more seats,” in Texas, kicking off a monthslong tit-for-tat that’s seen Democrats organizing around partisan map redrawing to counter new, pro-Republican maps. Red states like Texas, Missouri and Indiana are adapting new GOP-friendly maps, while California, Virginia and other blue states are attempting to alter their own maps in response.
None of this bodes well for fair representation of minority voters, Sara Rohani, assistant counsel at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, noting thatBlack people are historically undercounted in the census.
“Fair political representation, access to government services, and effective enforcement of civil rights laws,” said Rohani, who participated in a case challenging Louisiana’s congressional map for anti-Black racial bias, “all depend on this accurate census count.”
America’s increasing racial diversity has heavily influenced redistricting across the country. Though there’s been a decrease in majority-Black districts, Latino and Asian-American voters have seen increased representation, according to a 2023 analysis from the now-defunct publication FiveThirtyEight.
“SPD 15 is something we can and should and need to be doing to avoid a situation in which communities may be undercounted and continue to remain historically invisible,” said Goldstein. “The goal of SPD 15 is to change the course of history, where communities have been invisible, for political representation and in terms of resource allocation.”
But Project 2025, the sweeping Heritage Foundation policy initiative that’s guiding many aspects of Trump’s second administration, directly targeted SPD 15 for “review.”
“A new conservative Administration should take control of this process and thoroughly review any changes,” the document’s authors said of the directive revisions. “There are concerns among conservatives that the data under Biden Administration proposals could be skewed to bolster progressive political agendas.”
The Trump team appears to be taking this advice to heart at the same time it is seeking to diminish minority communities’ political and economic power in other ways.
Typically, redistricting is done every 10 years based on the results of the decennial census. But this administration is pushing states to engage in unprecedented mid-cycle redistricting now, while also delaying the implementation of SPD 15. That, in turn, could impact the 2030 census results, which could fail to capture the true diversity of America’s communities, and therefore impact how new maps are drawn in response.
In August, Trump said congressional Republicans “are entitled to five more seats,” in Texas, kicking off a monthslong tit-for-tat that’s seen Democrats organizing around partisan map redrawing to counter new, pro-Republican maps. Red states like Texas, Missouri and Indiana are adapting new GOP-friendly maps, while California, Virginia and other blue states are attempting to alter their own maps in response.
None of this bodes well for fair representation of minority voters, Sara Rohani, assistant counsel at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, noting thatBlack people are historically undercounted in the census.
“Fair political representation, access to government services, and effective enforcement of civil rights laws,” said Rohani, who participated in a case challenging Louisiana’s congressional map for anti-Black racial bias, “all depend on this accurate census count.”
“With the new standards, what we do anticipate seeing is less people selecting some other race so you are more able to have a clearer understanding of the underlying demographies of districts,” said Anand. “And to have that clearer picture of the congregations and concentrations of race and ethnicities without having that more loose category muddying up the data.”
America’s increasing racial diversity has heavily influenced redistricting across the country. Though there’s been a decrease in majority-Black districts, Latino and Asian-American voters have seen increased representation, according to a 2023 analysis from the now-defunct publication FiveThirtyEight.
“SPD 15 is something we can and should and need to be doing to avoid a situation in which communities may be undercounted and continue to remain historically invisible,” said Goldstein. “The goal of SPD 15 is to change the course of history, where communities have been invisible, for political representation and in terms of resource allocation.”
But Project 2025, the sweeping Heritage Foundation policy initiative that’s guiding many aspects of Trump’s second administration, directly targeted SPD 15 for “review.”
“A new conservative Administration should take control of this process and thoroughly review any changes,” the document’s authors said of the directive revisions. “There are concerns among conservatives that the data under Biden Administration proposals could be skewed to bolster progressive political agendas.”
The Trump team appears to be taking this advice to heart at the same time it is seeking to diminish minority communities’ political and economic power in other ways.
Typically, redistricting is done every 10 years based on the results of the decennial census. But this administration is pushing states to engage in unprecedented mid-cycle redistricting now, while also delaying the implementation of SPD 15. That, in turn, could impact the 2030 census results, which could fail to capture the true diversity of America’s communities, and therefore impact how new maps are drawn in response.
In August, Trump said congressional Republicans “are entitled to five more seats,” in Texas, kicking off a monthslong tit-for-tat that’s seen Democrats organizing around partisan map redrawing to counter new, pro-Republican maps. Red states like Texas, Missouri and Indiana are adapting new GOP-friendly maps, while California, Virginia and other blue states are attempting to alter their own maps in response.
None of this bodes well for fair representation of minority voters, Sara Rohani, assistant counsel at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, noting thatBlack people are historically undercounted in the census.
“Fair political representation, access to government services, and effective enforcement of civil rights laws,” said Rohani, who participated in a case challenging Louisiana’s congressional map for anti-Black racial bias, “all depend on this accurate census count.”
By June 2022, OMB announced its intention to revise the federal race and ethnicity data collection protocol. Initial revisions were published the following January and finalized by March 2024. They were the result, according to an OMB webpage about the policy, of 20,000 public comments, 94 listening sessions, three townhalls, a tribal consultation and the contributions of government staff from 35 agencies. The new rule combines race and ethnicity survey questions into one prompt, and encourages respondents to select every option they use to self-identify, writing in additional ethnicity categories if necessary. For example, a Hispanic American could self-identify as Dominican, Guatemalan, or Spanish. It also adds a Middle Eastern or North African racial category.
“With the new standards, what we do anticipate seeing is less people selecting some other race so you are more able to have a clearer understanding of the underlying demographies of districts,” said Anand. “And to have that clearer picture of the congregations and concentrations of race and ethnicities without having that more loose category muddying up the data.”
America’s increasing racial diversity has heavily influenced redistricting across the country. Though there’s been a decrease in majority-Black districts, Latino and Asian-American voters have seen increased representation, according to a 2023 analysis from the now-defunct publication FiveThirtyEight.
“SPD 15 is something we can and should and need to be doing to avoid a situation in which communities may be undercounted and continue to remain historically invisible,” said Goldstein. “The goal of SPD 15 is to change the course of history, where communities have been invisible, for political representation and in terms of resource allocation.”
But Project 2025, the sweeping Heritage Foundation policy initiative that’s guiding many aspects of Trump’s second administration, directly targeted SPD 15 for “review.”
“A new conservative Administration should take control of this process and thoroughly review any changes,” the document’s authors said of the directive revisions. “There are concerns among conservatives that the data under Biden Administration proposals could be skewed to bolster progressive political agendas.”
The Trump team appears to be taking this advice to heart at the same time it is seeking to diminish minority communities’ political and economic power in other ways.
Typically, redistricting is done every 10 years based on the results of the decennial census. But this administration is pushing states to engage in unprecedented mid-cycle redistricting now, while also delaying the implementation of SPD 15. That, in turn, could impact the 2030 census results, which could fail to capture the true diversity of America’s communities, and therefore impact how new maps are drawn in response.
In August, Trump said congressional Republicans “are entitled to five more seats,” in Texas, kicking off a monthslong tit-for-tat that’s seen Democrats organizing around partisan map redrawing to counter new, pro-Republican maps. Red states like Texas, Missouri and Indiana are adapting new GOP-friendly maps, while California, Virginia and other blue states are attempting to alter their own maps in response.
None of this bodes well for fair representation of minority voters, Sara Rohani, assistant counsel at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, noting thatBlack people are historically undercounted in the census.
“Fair political representation, access to government services, and effective enforcement of civil rights laws,” said Rohani, who participated in a case challenging Louisiana’s congressional map for anti-Black racial bias, “all depend on this accurate census count.”
The “huge uptick” in additional ethnic identification responses wasere “a huge sign that the forms weren’t giving people the ability to identify themselves in the way they view themselves,” Meeta Anand, director for census and data equity at the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights.
By June 2022, OMB announced its intention to revise the federal race and ethnicity data collection protocol. Initial revisions were published the following January and finalized by March 2024. They were the result, according to an OMB webpage about the policy, of 20,000 public comments, 94 listening sessions, three townhalls, a tribal consultation and the contributions of government staff from 35 agencies. The new rule combines race and ethnicity survey questions into one prompt, and encourages respondents to select every option they use to self-identify, writing in additional ethnicity categories if necessary. For example, a Hispanic American could self-identify as Dominican, Guatemalan, or Spanish. It also adds a Middle Eastern or North African racial category.
“With the new standards, what we do anticipate seeing is less people selecting some other race so you are more able to have a clearer understanding of the underlying demographies of districts,” said Anand. “And to have that clearer picture of the congregations and concentrations of race and ethnicities without having that more loose category muddying up the data.”
America’s increasing racial diversity has heavily influenced redistricting across the country. Though there’s been a decrease in majority-Black districts, Latino and Asian-American voters have seen increased representation, according to a 2023 analysis from the now-defunct publication FiveThirtyEight.
“SPD 15 is something we can and should and need to be doing to avoid a situation in which communities may be undercounted and continue to remain historically invisible,” said Goldstein. “The goal of SPD 15 is to change the course of history, where communities have been invisible, for political representation and in terms of resource allocation.”
But Project 2025, the sweeping Heritage Foundation policy initiative that’s guiding many aspects of Trump’s second administration, directly targeted SPD 15 for “review.”
“A new conservative Administration should take control of this process and thoroughly review any changes,” the document’s authors said of the directive revisions. “There are concerns among conservatives that the data under Biden Administration proposals could be skewed to bolster progressive political agendas.”
The Trump team appears to be taking this advice to heart at the same time it is seeking to diminish minority communities’ political and economic power in other ways.
Typically, redistricting is done every 10 years based on the results of the decennial census. But this administration is pushing states to engage in unprecedented mid-cycle redistricting now, while also delaying the implementation of SPD 15. That, in turn, could impact the 2030 census results, which could fail to capture the true diversity of America’s communities, and therefore impact how new maps are drawn in response.
In August, Trump said congressional Republicans “are entitled to five more seats,” in Texas, kicking off a monthslong tit-for-tat that’s seen Democrats organizing around partisan map redrawing to counter new, pro-Republican maps. Red states like Texas, Missouri and Indiana are adapting new GOP-friendly maps, while California, Virginia and other blue states are attempting to alter their own maps in response.
None of this bodes well for fair representation of minority voters, Sara Rohani, assistant counsel at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, noting thatBlack people are historically undercounted in the census.
“Fair political representation, access to government services, and effective enforcement of civil rights laws,” said Rohani, who participated in a case challenging Louisiana’s congressional map for anti-Black racial bias, “all depend on this accurate census count.”
The campaign for updates to federal race and ethnicity survey standards initially began under President Barack Obama’s administration in 2016, but stalled in 2017 after Trump in his first administration delayed consideration of the changes indefinitely. The updates were renewed under Biden, prompted in part by the 2020 Census results, which saw members of many communities start writing in their ethnicities: Cambodian, Laotian, Haitian, Armenian, Israeli.
The “huge uptick” in additional ethnic identification responses wasere “a huge sign that the forms weren’t giving people the ability to identify themselves in the way they view themselves,” Meeta Anand, director for census and data equity at the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights.
By June 2022, OMB announced its intention to revise the federal race and ethnicity data collection protocol. Initial revisions were published the following January and finalized by March 2024. They were the result, according to an OMB webpage about the policy, of 20,000 public comments, 94 listening sessions, three townhalls, a tribal consultation and the contributions of government staff from 35 agencies. The new rule combines race and ethnicity survey questions into one prompt, and encourages respondents to select every option they use to self-identify, writing in additional ethnicity categories if necessary. For example, a Hispanic American could self-identify as Dominican, Guatemalan, or Spanish. It also adds a Middle Eastern or North African racial category.
“With the new standards, what we do anticipate seeing is less people selecting some other race so you are more able to have a clearer understanding of the underlying demographies of districts,” said Anand. “And to have that clearer picture of the congregations and concentrations of race and ethnicities without having that more loose category muddying up the data.”
America’s increasing racial diversity has heavily influenced redistricting across the country. Though there’s been a decrease in majority-Black districts, Latino and Asian-American voters have seen increased representation, according to a 2023 analysis from the now-defunct publication FiveThirtyEight.
“SPD 15 is something we can and should and need to be doing to avoid a situation in which communities may be undercounted and continue to remain historically invisible,” said Goldstein. “The goal of SPD 15 is to change the course of history, where communities have been invisible, for political representation and in terms of resource allocation.”
But Project 2025, the sweeping Heritage Foundation policy initiative that’s guiding many aspects of Trump’s second administration, directly targeted SPD 15 for “review.”
“A new conservative Administration should take control of this process and thoroughly review any changes,” the document’s authors said of the directive revisions. “There are concerns among conservatives that the data under Biden Administration proposals could be skewed to bolster progressive political agendas.”
The Trump team appears to be taking this advice to heart at the same time it is seeking to diminish minority communities’ political and economic power in other ways.
Typically, redistricting is done every 10 years based on the results of the decennial census. But this administration is pushing states to engage in unprecedented mid-cycle redistricting now, while also delaying the implementation of SPD 15. That, in turn, could impact the 2030 census results, which could fail to capture the true diversity of America’s communities, and therefore impact how new maps are drawn in response.
In August, Trump said congressional Republicans “are entitled to five more seats,” in Texas, kicking off a monthslong tit-for-tat that’s seen Democrats organizing around partisan map redrawing to counter new, pro-Republican maps. Red states like Texas, Missouri and Indiana are adapting new GOP-friendly maps, while California, Virginia and other blue states are attempting to alter their own maps in response.
None of this bodes well for fair representation of minority voters, Sara Rohani, assistant counsel at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, noting thatBlack people are historically undercounted in the census.
“Fair political representation, access to government services, and effective enforcement of civil rights laws,” said Rohani, who participated in a case challenging Louisiana’s congressional map for anti-Black racial bias, “all depend on this accurate census count.”
The campaign for updates to federal race and ethnicity survey standards initially began under President Barack Obama’s administration in 2016, but stalled in 2017 after Trump in his first administration delayed consideration of the changes indefinitely. The updates were renewed under Biden, prompted in part by the 2020 Census results, which saw members of many communities start writing in their ethnicities: Cambodian, Laotian, Haitian, Armenian, Israeli.
The “huge uptick” in additional ethnic identification responses wasere “a huge sign that the forms weren’t giving people the ability to identify themselves in the way they view themselves,” Meeta Anand, director for census and data equity at the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights.
By June 2022, OMB announced its intention to revise the federal race and ethnicity data collection protocol. Initial revisions were published the following January and finalized by March 2024. They were the result, according to an OMB webpage about the policy, of 20,000 public comments, 94 listening sessions, three townhalls, a tribal consultation and the contributions of government staff from 35 agencies. The new rule combines race and ethnicity survey questions into one prompt, and encourages respondents to select every option they use to self-identify, writing in additional ethnicity categories if necessary. For example, a Hispanic American could self-identify as Dominican, Guatemalan, or Spanish. It also adds a Middle Eastern or North African racial category.
“With the new standards, what we do anticipate seeing is less people selecting some other race so you are more able to have a clearer understanding of the underlying demographies of districts,” said Anand. “And to have that clearer picture of the congregations and concentrations of race and ethnicities without having that more loose category muddying up the data.”
America’s increasing racial diversity has heavily influenced redistricting across the country. Though there’s been a decrease in majority-Black districts, Latino and Asian-American voters have seen increased representation, according to a 2023 analysis from the now-defunct publication FiveThirtyEight.
“SPD 15 is something we can and should and need to be doing to avoid a situation in which communities may be undercounted and continue to remain historically invisible,” said Goldstein. “The goal of SPD 15 is to change the course of history, where communities have been invisible, for political representation and in terms of resource allocation.”
But Project 2025, the sweeping Heritage Foundation policy initiative that’s guiding many aspects of Trump’s second administration, directly targeted SPD 15 for “review.”
“A new conservative Administration should take control of this process and thoroughly review any changes,” the document’s authors said of the directive revisions. “There are concerns among conservatives that the data under Biden Administration proposals could be skewed to bolster progressive political agendas.”
The Trump team appears to be taking this advice to heart at the same time it is seeking to diminish minority communities’ political and economic power in other ways.
Typically, redistricting is done every 10 years based on the results of the decennial census. But this administration is pushing states to engage in unprecedented mid-cycle redistricting now, while also delaying the implementation of SPD 15. That, in turn, could impact the 2030 census results, which could fail to capture the true diversity of America’s communities, and therefore impact how new maps are drawn in response.
In August, Trump said congressional Republicans “are entitled to five more seats,” in Texas, kicking off a monthslong tit-for-tat that’s seen Democrats organizing around partisan map redrawing to counter new, pro-Republican maps. Red states like Texas, Missouri and Indiana are adapting new GOP-friendly maps, while California, Virginia and other blue states are attempting to alter their own maps in response.
None of this bodes well for fair representation of minority voters, Sara Rohani, assistant counsel at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, noting thatBlack people are historically undercounted in the census.
“Fair political representation, access to government services, and effective enforcement of civil rights laws,” said Rohani, who participated in a case challenging Louisiana’s congressional map for anti-Black racial bias, “all depend on this accurate census count.”
Dinh sees the delayed implementation of SPD 15 as potentially of a piece with “a long term effort to chip away and potentially impact the 2030 Census.”
“It’s certainly possible that the administration is trying to delay the release of detailed data about racial communities that could hinder their redistricting in Republican states,” she told TPM.
A Conservative Assault on the Census
The campaign for updates to federal race and ethnicity survey standards initially began under President Barack Obama’s administration in 2016, but stalled in 2017 after Trump in his first administration delayed consideration of the changes indefinitely. The updates were renewed under Biden, prompted in part by the 2020 Census results, which saw members of many communities start writing in their ethnicities: Cambodian, Laotian, Haitian, Armenian, Israeli.
The “huge uptick” in additional ethnic identification responses wasere “a huge sign that the forms weren’t giving people the ability to identify themselves in the way they view themselves,” Meeta Anand, director for census and data equity at the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights.
By June 2022, OMB announced its intention to revise the federal race and ethnicity data collection protocol. Initial revisions were published the following January and finalized by March 2024. They were the result, according to an OMB webpage about the policy, of 20,000 public comments, 94 listening sessions, three townhalls, a tribal consultation and the contributions of government staff from 35 agencies. The new rule combines race and ethnicity survey questions into one prompt, and encourages respondents to select every option they use to self-identify, writing in additional ethnicity categories if necessary. For example, a Hispanic American could self-identify as Dominican, Guatemalan, or Spanish. It also adds a Middle Eastern or North African racial category.
“With the new standards, what we do anticipate seeing is less people selecting some other race so you are more able to have a clearer understanding of the underlying demographies of districts,” said Anand. “And to have that clearer picture of the congregations and concentrations of race and ethnicities without having that more loose category muddying up the data.”
America’s increasing racial diversity has heavily influenced redistricting across the country. Though there’s been a decrease in majority-Black districts, Latino and Asian-American voters have seen increased representation, according to a 2023 analysis from the now-defunct publication FiveThirtyEight.
“SPD 15 is something we can and should and need to be doing to avoid a situation in which communities may be undercounted and continue to remain historically invisible,” said Goldstein. “The goal of SPD 15 is to change the course of history, where communities have been invisible, for political representation and in terms of resource allocation.”
But Project 2025, the sweeping Heritage Foundation policy initiative that’s guiding many aspects of Trump’s second administration, directly targeted SPD 15 for “review.”
“A new conservative Administration should take control of this process and thoroughly review any changes,” the document’s authors said of the directive revisions. “There are concerns among conservatives that the data under Biden Administration proposals could be skewed to bolster progressive political agendas.”
The Trump team appears to be taking this advice to heart at the same time it is seeking to diminish minority communities’ political and economic power in other ways.
Typically, redistricting is done every 10 years based on the results of the decennial census. But this administration is pushing states to engage in unprecedented mid-cycle redistricting now, while also delaying the implementation of SPD 15. That, in turn, could impact the 2030 census results, which could fail to capture the true diversity of America’s communities, and therefore impact how new maps are drawn in response.
In August, Trump said congressional Republicans “are entitled to five more seats,” in Texas, kicking off a monthslong tit-for-tat that’s seen Democrats organizing around partisan map redrawing to counter new, pro-Republican maps. Red states like Texas, Missouri and Indiana are adapting new GOP-friendly maps, while California, Virginia and other blue states are attempting to alter their own maps in response.
None of this bodes well for fair representation of minority voters, Sara Rohani, assistant counsel at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, noting thatBlack people are historically undercounted in the census.
“Fair political representation, access to government services, and effective enforcement of civil rights laws,” said Rohani, who participated in a case challenging Louisiana’s congressional map for anti-Black racial bias, “all depend on this accurate census count.”
“Census data, which includes SPD 15, is a huge determinant in how voting districts are drawn and, beyond just how the districts are drawn, that census data is critical in determining how federal funds are distributed,” said Gaby Goldstein, founder of State Futures, a policy organization focused on state government.
Dinh sees the delayed implementation of SPD 15 as potentially of a piece with “a long term effort to chip away and potentially impact the 2030 Census.”
“It’s certainly possible that the administration is trying to delay the release of detailed data about racial communities that could hinder their redistricting in Republican states,” she told TPM.
A Conservative Assault on the Census
The campaign for updates to federal race and ethnicity survey standards initially began under President Barack Obama’s administration in 2016, but stalled in 2017 after Trump in his first administration delayed consideration of the changes indefinitely. The updates were renewed under Biden, prompted in part by the 2020 Census results, which saw members of many communities start writing in their ethnicities: Cambodian, Laotian, Haitian, Armenian, Israeli.
The “huge uptick” in additional ethnic identification responses wasere “a huge sign that the forms weren’t giving people the ability to identify themselves in the way they view themselves,” Meeta Anand, director for census and data equity at the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights.
By June 2022, OMB announced its intention to revise the federal race and ethnicity data collection protocol. Initial revisions were published the following January and finalized by March 2024. They were the result, according to an OMB webpage about the policy, of 20,000 public comments, 94 listening sessions, three townhalls, a tribal consultation and the contributions of government staff from 35 agencies. The new rule combines race and ethnicity survey questions into one prompt, and encourages respondents to select every option they use to self-identify, writing in additional ethnicity categories if necessary. For example, a Hispanic American could self-identify as Dominican, Guatemalan, or Spanish. It also adds a Middle Eastern or North African racial category.
“With the new standards, what we do anticipate seeing is less people selecting some other race so you are more able to have a clearer understanding of the underlying demographies of districts,” said Anand. “And to have that clearer picture of the congregations and concentrations of race and ethnicities without having that more loose category muddying up the data.”
America’s increasing racial diversity has heavily influenced redistricting across the country. Though there’s been a decrease in majority-Black districts, Latino and Asian-American voters have seen increased representation, according to a 2023 analysis from the now-defunct publication FiveThirtyEight.
“SPD 15 is something we can and should and need to be doing to avoid a situation in which communities may be undercounted and continue to remain historically invisible,” said Goldstein. “The goal of SPD 15 is to change the course of history, where communities have been invisible, for political representation and in terms of resource allocation.”
But Project 2025, the sweeping Heritage Foundation policy initiative that’s guiding many aspects of Trump’s second administration, directly targeted SPD 15 for “review.”
“A new conservative Administration should take control of this process and thoroughly review any changes,” the document’s authors said of the directive revisions. “There are concerns among conservatives that the data under Biden Administration proposals could be skewed to bolster progressive political agendas.”
The Trump team appears to be taking this advice to heart at the same time it is seeking to diminish minority communities’ political and economic power in other ways.
Typically, redistricting is done every 10 years based on the results of the decennial census. But this administration is pushing states to engage in unprecedented mid-cycle redistricting now, while also delaying the implementation of SPD 15. That, in turn, could impact the 2030 census results, which could fail to capture the true diversity of America’s communities, and therefore impact how new maps are drawn in response.
In August, Trump said congressional Republicans “are entitled to five more seats,” in Texas, kicking off a monthslong tit-for-tat that’s seen Democrats organizing around partisan map redrawing to counter new, pro-Republican maps. Red states like Texas, Missouri and Indiana are adapting new GOP-friendly maps, while California, Virginia and other blue states are attempting to alter their own maps in response.
None of this bodes well for fair representation of minority voters, Sara Rohani, assistant counsel at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, noting thatBlack people are historically undercounted in the census.
“Fair political representation, access to government services, and effective enforcement of civil rights laws,” said Rohani, who participated in a case challenging Louisiana’s congressional map for anti-Black racial bias, “all depend on this accurate census count.”
Because of the role race plays in redistricting considerations, delaying the implementation of best-practice race and ethnicity data collection will muddy the information available about majority-minority areas — which also tend to support Democrats — when it next comes time to draw political maps.
“Census data, which includes SPD 15, is a huge determinant in how voting districts are drawn and, beyond just how the districts are drawn, that census data is critical in determining how federal funds are distributed,” said Gaby Goldstein, founder of State Futures, a policy organization focused on state government.
Dinh sees the delayed implementation of SPD 15 as potentially of a piece with “a long term effort to chip away and potentially impact the 2030 Census.”
“It’s certainly possible that the administration is trying to delay the release of detailed data about racial communities that could hinder their redistricting in Republican states,” she told TPM.
A Conservative Assault on the Census
The campaign for updates to federal race and ethnicity survey standards initially began under President Barack Obama’s administration in 2016, but stalled in 2017 after Trump in his first administration delayed consideration of the changes indefinitely. The updates were renewed under Biden, prompted in part by the 2020 Census results, which saw members of many communities start writing in their ethnicities: Cambodian, Laotian, Haitian, Armenian, Israeli.
The “huge uptick” in additional ethnic identification responses wasere “a huge sign that the forms weren’t giving people the ability to identify themselves in the way they view themselves,” Meeta Anand, director for census and data equity at the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights.
By June 2022, OMB announced its intention to revise the federal race and ethnicity data collection protocol. Initial revisions were published the following January and finalized by March 2024. They were the result, according to an OMB webpage about the policy, of 20,000 public comments, 94 listening sessions, three townhalls, a tribal consultation and the contributions of government staff from 35 agencies. The new rule combines race and ethnicity survey questions into one prompt, and encourages respondents to select every option they use to self-identify, writing in additional ethnicity categories if necessary. For example, a Hispanic American could self-identify as Dominican, Guatemalan, or Spanish. It also adds a Middle Eastern or North African racial category.
“With the new standards, what we do anticipate seeing is less people selecting some other race so you are more able to have a clearer understanding of the underlying demographies of districts,” said Anand. “And to have that clearer picture of the congregations and concentrations of race and ethnicities without having that more loose category muddying up the data.”
America’s increasing racial diversity has heavily influenced redistricting across the country. Though there’s been a decrease in majority-Black districts, Latino and Asian-American voters have seen increased representation, according to a 2023 analysis from the now-defunct publication FiveThirtyEight.
“SPD 15 is something we can and should and need to be doing to avoid a situation in which communities may be undercounted and continue to remain historically invisible,” said Goldstein. “The goal of SPD 15 is to change the course of history, where communities have been invisible, for political representation and in terms of resource allocation.”
But Project 2025, the sweeping Heritage Foundation policy initiative that’s guiding many aspects of Trump’s second administration, directly targeted SPD 15 for “review.”
“A new conservative Administration should take control of this process and thoroughly review any changes,” the document’s authors said of the directive revisions. “There are concerns among conservatives that the data under Biden Administration proposals could be skewed to bolster progressive political agendas.”
The Trump team appears to be taking this advice to heart at the same time it is seeking to diminish minority communities’ political and economic power in other ways.
Typically, redistricting is done every 10 years based on the results of the decennial census. But this administration is pushing states to engage in unprecedented mid-cycle redistricting now, while also delaying the implementation of SPD 15. That, in turn, could impact the 2030 census results, which could fail to capture the true diversity of America’s communities, and therefore impact how new maps are drawn in response.
In August, Trump said congressional Republicans “are entitled to five more seats,” in Texas, kicking off a monthslong tit-for-tat that’s seen Democrats organizing around partisan map redrawing to counter new, pro-Republican maps. Red states like Texas, Missouri and Indiana are adapting new GOP-friendly maps, while California, Virginia and other blue states are attempting to alter their own maps in response.
None of this bodes well for fair representation of minority voters, Sara Rohani, assistant counsel at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, noting thatBlack people are historically undercounted in the census.
“Fair political representation, access to government services, and effective enforcement of civil rights laws,” said Rohani, who participated in a case challenging Louisiana’s congressional map for anti-Black racial bias, “all depend on this accurate census count.”
At Trump’s direction, state legislatures are aggressively pursuing new Republican-friendly political maps in red states ahead of the 2026 midterms. At the same time, the Supreme Court appears poised to overturn Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which has historically prevented the dilution of the collective electoral power of racial minorities. That outcome would likely allow Republicans to pick up at least 19 more seats in the U.S. House, according to one analysis. It would also make it more challenging for both the federal government and voting rights groups to challenge alleged racial gerrymanders.
Because of the role race plays in redistricting considerations, delaying the implementation of best-practice race and ethnicity data collection will muddy the information available about majority-minority areas — which also tend to support Democrats — when it next comes time to draw political maps.
“Census data, which includes SPD 15, is a huge determinant in how voting districts are drawn and, beyond just how the districts are drawn, that census data is critical in determining how federal funds are distributed,” said Gaby Goldstein, founder of State Futures, a policy organization focused on state government.
Dinh sees the delayed implementation of SPD 15 as potentially of a piece with “a long term effort to chip away and potentially impact the 2030 Census.”
“It’s certainly possible that the administration is trying to delay the release of detailed data about racial communities that could hinder their redistricting in Republican states,” she told TPM.
A Conservative Assault on the Census
The campaign for updates to federal race and ethnicity survey standards initially began under President Barack Obama’s administration in 2016, but stalled in 2017 after Trump in his first administration delayed consideration of the changes indefinitely. The updates were renewed under Biden, prompted in part by the 2020 Census results, which saw members of many communities start writing in their ethnicities: Cambodian, Laotian, Haitian, Armenian, Israeli.
The “huge uptick” in additional ethnic identification responses wasere “a huge sign that the forms weren’t giving people the ability to identify themselves in the way they view themselves,” Meeta Anand, director for census and data equity at the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights.
By June 2022, OMB announced its intention to revise the federal race and ethnicity data collection protocol. Initial revisions were published the following January and finalized by March 2024. They were the result, according to an OMB webpage about the policy, of 20,000 public comments, 94 listening sessions, three townhalls, a tribal consultation and the contributions of government staff from 35 agencies. The new rule combines race and ethnicity survey questions into one prompt, and encourages respondents to select every option they use to self-identify, writing in additional ethnicity categories if necessary. For example, a Hispanic American could self-identify as Dominican, Guatemalan, or Spanish. It also adds a Middle Eastern or North African racial category.
“With the new standards, what we do anticipate seeing is less people selecting some other race so you are more able to have a clearer understanding of the underlying demographies of districts,” said Anand. “And to have that clearer picture of the congregations and concentrations of race and ethnicities without having that more loose category muddying up the data.”
America’s increasing racial diversity has heavily influenced redistricting across the country. Though there’s been a decrease in majority-Black districts, Latino and Asian-American voters have seen increased representation, according to a 2023 analysis from the now-defunct publication FiveThirtyEight.
“SPD 15 is something we can and should and need to be doing to avoid a situation in which communities may be undercounted and continue to remain historically invisible,” said Goldstein. “The goal of SPD 15 is to change the course of history, where communities have been invisible, for political representation and in terms of resource allocation.”
But Project 2025, the sweeping Heritage Foundation policy initiative that’s guiding many aspects of Trump’s second administration, directly targeted SPD 15 for “review.”
“A new conservative Administration should take control of this process and thoroughly review any changes,” the document’s authors said of the directive revisions. “There are concerns among conservatives that the data under Biden Administration proposals could be skewed to bolster progressive political agendas.”
The Trump team appears to be taking this advice to heart at the same time it is seeking to diminish minority communities’ political and economic power in other ways.
Typically, redistricting is done every 10 years based on the results of the decennial census. But this administration is pushing states to engage in unprecedented mid-cycle redistricting now, while also delaying the implementation of SPD 15. That, in turn, could impact the 2030 census results, which could fail to capture the true diversity of America’s communities, and therefore impact how new maps are drawn in response.
In August, Trump said congressional Republicans “are entitled to five more seats,” in Texas, kicking off a monthslong tit-for-tat that’s seen Democrats organizing around partisan map redrawing to counter new, pro-Republican maps. Red states like Texas, Missouri and Indiana are adapting new GOP-friendly maps, while California, Virginia and other blue states are attempting to alter their own maps in response.
None of this bodes well for fair representation of minority voters, Sara Rohani, assistant counsel at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, noting thatBlack people are historically undercounted in the census.
“Fair political representation, access to government services, and effective enforcement of civil rights laws,” said Rohani, who participated in a case challenging Louisiana’s congressional map for anti-Black racial bias, “all depend on this accurate census count.”
The delayed implementation of SPD 15 also coincides with the GOP’s latest efforts to engage in hyper-partisan gerrymandering. And while it’s not entirely clear what implications the directive, or its delay, will have on the way in which districts are drawn post-census, advocates are raising the alarm because of Trump and the GOP’s frequent use of race and ethnicity data to further their political aims, including through racial gerrymandering.
At Trump’s direction, state legislatures are aggressively pursuing new Republican-friendly political maps in red states ahead of the 2026 midterms. At the same time, the Supreme Court appears poised to overturn Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which has historically prevented the dilution of the collective electoral power of racial minorities. That outcome would likely allow Republicans to pick up at least 19 more seats in the U.S. House, according to one analysis. It would also make it more challenging for both the federal government and voting rights groups to challenge alleged racial gerrymanders.
Because of the role race plays in redistricting considerations, delaying the implementation of best-practice race and ethnicity data collection will muddy the information available about majority-minority areas — which also tend to support Democrats — when it next comes time to draw political maps.
“Census data, which includes SPD 15, is a huge determinant in how voting districts are drawn and, beyond just how the districts are drawn, that census data is critical in determining how federal funds are distributed,” said Gaby Goldstein, founder of State Futures, a policy organization focused on state government.
Dinh sees the delayed implementation of SPD 15 as potentially of a piece with “a long term effort to chip away and potentially impact the 2030 Census.”
“It’s certainly possible that the administration is trying to delay the release of detailed data about racial communities that could hinder their redistricting in Republican states,” she told TPM.
A Conservative Assault on the Census
The campaign for updates to federal race and ethnicity survey standards initially began under President Barack Obama’s administration in 2016, but stalled in 2017 after Trump in his first administration delayed consideration of the changes indefinitely. The updates were renewed under Biden, prompted in part by the 2020 Census results, which saw members of many communities start writing in their ethnicities: Cambodian, Laotian, Haitian, Armenian, Israeli.
The “huge uptick” in additional ethnic identification responses wasere “a huge sign that the forms weren’t giving people the ability to identify themselves in the way they view themselves,” Meeta Anand, director for census and data equity at the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights.
By June 2022, OMB announced its intention to revise the federal race and ethnicity data collection protocol. Initial revisions were published the following January and finalized by March 2024. They were the result, according to an OMB webpage about the policy, of 20,000 public comments, 94 listening sessions, three townhalls, a tribal consultation and the contributions of government staff from 35 agencies. The new rule combines race and ethnicity survey questions into one prompt, and encourages respondents to select every option they use to self-identify, writing in additional ethnicity categories if necessary. For example, a Hispanic American could self-identify as Dominican, Guatemalan, or Spanish. It also adds a Middle Eastern or North African racial category.
“With the new standards, what we do anticipate seeing is less people selecting some other race so you are more able to have a clearer understanding of the underlying demographies of districts,” said Anand. “And to have that clearer picture of the congregations and concentrations of race and ethnicities without having that more loose category muddying up the data.”
America’s increasing racial diversity has heavily influenced redistricting across the country. Though there’s been a decrease in majority-Black districts, Latino and Asian-American voters have seen increased representation, according to a 2023 analysis from the now-defunct publication FiveThirtyEight.
“SPD 15 is something we can and should and need to be doing to avoid a situation in which communities may be undercounted and continue to remain historically invisible,” said Goldstein. “The goal of SPD 15 is to change the course of history, where communities have been invisible, for political representation and in terms of resource allocation.”
But Project 2025, the sweeping Heritage Foundation policy initiative that’s guiding many aspects of Trump’s second administration, directly targeted SPD 15 for “review.”
“A new conservative Administration should take control of this process and thoroughly review any changes,” the document’s authors said of the directive revisions. “There are concerns among conservatives that the data under Biden Administration proposals could be skewed to bolster progressive political agendas.”
The Trump team appears to be taking this advice to heart at the same time it is seeking to diminish minority communities’ political and economic power in other ways.
Typically, redistricting is done every 10 years based on the results of the decennial census. But this administration is pushing states to engage in unprecedented mid-cycle redistricting now, while also delaying the implementation of SPD 15. That, in turn, could impact the 2030 census results, which could fail to capture the true diversity of America’s communities, and therefore impact how new maps are drawn in response.
In August, Trump said congressional Republicans “are entitled to five more seats,” in Texas, kicking off a monthslong tit-for-tat that’s seen Democrats organizing around partisan map redrawing to counter new, pro-Republican maps. Red states like Texas, Missouri and Indiana are adapting new GOP-friendly maps, while California, Virginia and other blue states are attempting to alter their own maps in response.
None of this bodes well for fair representation of minority voters, Sara Rohani, assistant counsel at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, noting thatBlack people are historically undercounted in the census.
“Fair political representation, access to government services, and effective enforcement of civil rights laws,” said Rohani, who participated in a case challenging Louisiana’s congressional map for anti-Black racial bias, “all depend on this accurate census count.”
The delayed implementation of SPD 15 also coincides with the GOP’s latest efforts to engage in hyper-partisan gerrymandering. And while it’s not entirely clear what implications the directive, or its delay, will have on the way in which districts are drawn post-census, advocates are raising the alarm because of Trump and the GOP’s frequent use of race and ethnicity data to further their political aims, including through racial gerrymandering.
At Trump’s direction, state legislatures are aggressively pursuing new Republican-friendly political maps in red states ahead of the 2026 midterms. At the same time, the Supreme Court appears poised to overturn Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which has historically prevented the dilution of the collective electoral power of racial minorities. That outcome would likely allow Republicans to pick up at least 19 more seats in the U.S. House, according to one analysis. It would also make it more challenging for both the federal government and voting rights groups to challenge alleged racial gerrymanders.
Because of the role race plays in redistricting considerations, delaying the implementation of best-practice race and ethnicity data collection will muddy the information available about majority-minority areas — which also tend to support Democrats — when it next comes time to draw political maps.
“Census data, which includes SPD 15, is a huge determinant in how voting districts are drawn and, beyond just how the districts are drawn, that census data is critical in determining how federal funds are distributed,” said Gaby Goldstein, founder of State Futures, a policy organization focused on state government.
Dinh sees the delayed implementation of SPD 15 as potentially of a piece with “a long term effort to chip away and potentially impact the 2030 Census.”
“It’s certainly possible that the administration is trying to delay the release of detailed data about racial communities that could hinder their redistricting in Republican states,” she told TPM.
A Conservative Assault on the Census
The campaign for updates to federal race and ethnicity survey standards initially began under President Barack Obama’s administration in 2016, but stalled in 2017 after Trump in his first administration delayed consideration of the changes indefinitely. The updates were renewed under Biden, prompted in part by the 2020 Census results, which saw members of many communities start writing in their ethnicities: Cambodian, Laotian, Haitian, Armenian, Israeli.
The “huge uptick” in additional ethnic identification responses wasere “a huge sign that the forms weren’t giving people the ability to identify themselves in the way they view themselves,” Meeta Anand, director for census and data equity at the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights.
By June 2022, OMB announced its intention to revise the federal race and ethnicity data collection protocol. Initial revisions were published the following January and finalized by March 2024. They were the result, according to an OMB webpage about the policy, of 20,000 public comments, 94 listening sessions, three townhalls, a tribal consultation and the contributions of government staff from 35 agencies. The new rule combines race and ethnicity survey questions into one prompt, and encourages respondents to select every option they use to self-identify, writing in additional ethnicity categories if necessary. For example, a Hispanic American could self-identify as Dominican, Guatemalan, or Spanish. It also adds a Middle Eastern or North African racial category.
“With the new standards, what we do anticipate seeing is less people selecting some other race so you are more able to have a clearer understanding of the underlying demographies of districts,” said Anand. “And to have that clearer picture of the congregations and concentrations of race and ethnicities without having that more loose category muddying up the data.”
America’s increasing racial diversity has heavily influenced redistricting across the country. Though there’s been a decrease in majority-Black districts, Latino and Asian-American voters have seen increased representation, according to a 2023 analysis from the now-defunct publication FiveThirtyEight.
“SPD 15 is something we can and should and need to be doing to avoid a situation in which communities may be undercounted and continue to remain historically invisible,” said Goldstein. “The goal of SPD 15 is to change the course of history, where communities have been invisible, for political representation and in terms of resource allocation.”
But Project 2025, the sweeping Heritage Foundation policy initiative that’s guiding many aspects of Trump’s second administration, directly targeted SPD 15 for “review.”
“A new conservative Administration should take control of this process and thoroughly review any changes,” the document’s authors said of the directive revisions. “There are concerns among conservatives that the data under Biden Administration proposals could be skewed to bolster progressive political agendas.”
The Trump team appears to be taking this advice to heart at the same time it is seeking to diminish minority communities’ political and economic power in other ways.
Typically, redistricting is done every 10 years based on the results of the decennial census. But this administration is pushing states to engage in unprecedented mid-cycle redistricting now, while also delaying the implementation of SPD 15. That, in turn, could impact the 2030 census results, which could fail to capture the true diversity of America’s communities, and therefore impact how new maps are drawn in response.
In August, Trump said congressional Republicans “are entitled to five more seats,” in Texas, kicking off a monthslong tit-for-tat that’s seen Democrats organizing around partisan map redrawing to counter new, pro-Republican maps. Red states like Texas, Missouri and Indiana are adapting new GOP-friendly maps, while California, Virginia and other blue states are attempting to alter their own maps in response.
None of this bodes well for fair representation of minority voters, Sara Rohani, assistant counsel at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, noting thatBlack people are historically undercounted in the census.
“Fair political representation, access to government services, and effective enforcement of civil rights laws,” said Rohani, who participated in a case challenging Louisiana’s congressional map for anti-Black racial bias, “all depend on this accurate census count.”
SPD 15 was created to address those kinds of issues, allowing for more targeted government policy and for more fine-grained publicly available data used by researchers and community groups.
“The delay of SPD 15 means we don’t have access to realtime data,” Dinh said, “that can really save lives right now.
Inaccurate Race and Ethnicity Date Could Have a Big Impact on Political Representation
The delayed implementation of SPD 15 also coincides with the GOP’s latest efforts to engage in hyper-partisan gerrymandering. And while it’s not entirely clear what implications the directive, or its delay, will have on the way in which districts are drawn post-census, advocates are raising the alarm because of Trump and the GOP’s frequent use of race and ethnicity data to further their political aims, including through racial gerrymandering.
At Trump’s direction, state legislatures are aggressively pursuing new Republican-friendly political maps in red states ahead of the 2026 midterms. At the same time, the Supreme Court appears poised to overturn Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which has historically prevented the dilution of the collective electoral power of racial minorities. That outcome would likely allow Republicans to pick up at least 19 more seats in the U.S. House, according to one analysis. It would also make it more challenging for both the federal government and voting rights groups to challenge alleged racial gerrymanders.
Because of the role race plays in redistricting considerations, delaying the implementation of best-practice race and ethnicity data collection will muddy the information available about majority-minority areas — which also tend to support Democrats — when it next comes time to draw political maps.
“Census data, which includes SPD 15, is a huge determinant in how voting districts are drawn and, beyond just how the districts are drawn, that census data is critical in determining how federal funds are distributed,” said Gaby Goldstein, founder of State Futures, a policy organization focused on state government.
Dinh sees the delayed implementation of SPD 15 as potentially of a piece with “a long term effort to chip away and potentially impact the 2030 Census.”
“It’s certainly possible that the administration is trying to delay the release of detailed data about racial communities that could hinder their redistricting in Republican states,” she told TPM.
A Conservative Assault on the Census
The campaign for updates to federal race and ethnicity survey standards initially began under President Barack Obama’s administration in 2016, but stalled in 2017 after Trump in his first administration delayed consideration of the changes indefinitely. The updates were renewed under Biden, prompted in part by the 2020 Census results, which saw members of many communities start writing in their ethnicities: Cambodian, Laotian, Haitian, Armenian, Israeli.
The “huge uptick” in additional ethnic identification responses wasere “a huge sign that the forms weren’t giving people the ability to identify themselves in the way they view themselves,” Meeta Anand, director for census and data equity at the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights.
By June 2022, OMB announced its intention to revise the federal race and ethnicity data collection protocol. Initial revisions were published the following January and finalized by March 2024. They were the result, according to an OMB webpage about the policy, of 20,000 public comments, 94 listening sessions, three townhalls, a tribal consultation and the contributions of government staff from 35 agencies. The new rule combines race and ethnicity survey questions into one prompt, and encourages respondents to select every option they use to self-identify, writing in additional ethnicity categories if necessary. For example, a Hispanic American could self-identify as Dominican, Guatemalan, or Spanish. It also adds a Middle Eastern or North African racial category.
“With the new standards, what we do anticipate seeing is less people selecting some other race so you are more able to have a clearer understanding of the underlying demographies of districts,” said Anand. “And to have that clearer picture of the congregations and concentrations of race and ethnicities without having that more loose category muddying up the data.”
America’s increasing racial diversity has heavily influenced redistricting across the country. Though there’s been a decrease in majority-Black districts, Latino and Asian-American voters have seen increased representation, according to a 2023 analysis from the now-defunct publication FiveThirtyEight.
“SPD 15 is something we can and should and need to be doing to avoid a situation in which communities may be undercounted and continue to remain historically invisible,” said Goldstein. “The goal of SPD 15 is to change the course of history, where communities have been invisible, for political representation and in terms of resource allocation.”
But Project 2025, the sweeping Heritage Foundation policy initiative that’s guiding many aspects of Trump’s second administration, directly targeted SPD 15 for “review.”
“A new conservative Administration should take control of this process and thoroughly review any changes,” the document’s authors said of the directive revisions. “There are concerns among conservatives that the data under Biden Administration proposals could be skewed to bolster progressive political agendas.”
The Trump team appears to be taking this advice to heart at the same time it is seeking to diminish minority communities’ political and economic power in other ways.
Typically, redistricting is done every 10 years based on the results of the decennial census. But this administration is pushing states to engage in unprecedented mid-cycle redistricting now, while also delaying the implementation of SPD 15. That, in turn, could impact the 2030 census results, which could fail to capture the true diversity of America’s communities, and therefore impact how new maps are drawn in response.
In August, Trump said congressional Republicans “are entitled to five more seats,” in Texas, kicking off a monthslong tit-for-tat that’s seen Democrats organizing around partisan map redrawing to counter new, pro-Republican maps. Red states like Texas, Missouri and Indiana are adapting new GOP-friendly maps, while California, Virginia and other blue states are attempting to alter their own maps in response.
None of this bodes well for fair representation of minority voters, Sara Rohani, assistant counsel at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, noting thatBlack people are historically undercounted in the census.
“Fair political representation, access to government services, and effective enforcement of civil rights laws,” said Rohani, who participated in a case challenging Louisiana’s congressional map for anti-Black racial bias, “all depend on this accurate census count.”
“Our communities have been here for 50 years,” said Dinh of the Southeast Asian community specifically. But even now, she continued, “Wwe see that our communities are now facing intergenerational poverty,” she continued.. “We’re seeing intergenerational inequity in terms of educational attainment.”
SPD 15 was created to address those kinds of issues, allowing for more targeted government policy and for more fine-grained publicly available data used by researchers and community groups.
“The delay of SPD 15 means we don’t have access to realtime data,” Dinh said, “that can really save lives right now.
Inaccurate Race and Ethnicity Date Could Have a Big Impact on Political Representation
The delayed implementation of SPD 15 also coincides with the GOP’s latest efforts to engage in hyper-partisan gerrymandering. And while it’s not entirely clear what implications the directive, or its delay, will have on the way in which districts are drawn post-census, advocates are raising the alarm because of Trump and the GOP’s frequent use of race and ethnicity data to further their political aims, including through racial gerrymandering.
At Trump’s direction, state legislatures are aggressively pursuing new Republican-friendly political maps in red states ahead of the 2026 midterms. At the same time, the Supreme Court appears poised to overturn Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which has historically prevented the dilution of the collective electoral power of racial minorities. That outcome would likely allow Republicans to pick up at least 19 more seats in the U.S. House, according to one analysis. It would also make it more challenging for both the federal government and voting rights groups to challenge alleged racial gerrymanders.
Because of the role race plays in redistricting considerations, delaying the implementation of best-practice race and ethnicity data collection will muddy the information available about majority-minority areas — which also tend to support Democrats — when it next comes time to draw political maps.
“Census data, which includes SPD 15, is a huge determinant in how voting districts are drawn and, beyond just how the districts are drawn, that census data is critical in determining how federal funds are distributed,” said Gaby Goldstein, founder of State Futures, a policy organization focused on state government.
Dinh sees the delayed implementation of SPD 15 as potentially of a piece with “a long term effort to chip away and potentially impact the 2030 Census.”
“It’s certainly possible that the administration is trying to delay the release of detailed data about racial communities that could hinder their redistricting in Republican states,” she told TPM.
A Conservative Assault on the Census
The campaign for updates to federal race and ethnicity survey standards initially began under President Barack Obama’s administration in 2016, but stalled in 2017 after Trump in his first administration delayed consideration of the changes indefinitely. The updates were renewed under Biden, prompted in part by the 2020 Census results, which saw members of many communities start writing in their ethnicities: Cambodian, Laotian, Haitian, Armenian, Israeli.
The “huge uptick” in additional ethnic identification responses wasere “a huge sign that the forms weren’t giving people the ability to identify themselves in the way they view themselves,” Meeta Anand, director for census and data equity at the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights.
By June 2022, OMB announced its intention to revise the federal race and ethnicity data collection protocol. Initial revisions were published the following January and finalized by March 2024. They were the result, according to an OMB webpage about the policy, of 20,000 public comments, 94 listening sessions, three townhalls, a tribal consultation and the contributions of government staff from 35 agencies. The new rule combines race and ethnicity survey questions into one prompt, and encourages respondents to select every option they use to self-identify, writing in additional ethnicity categories if necessary. For example, a Hispanic American could self-identify as Dominican, Guatemalan, or Spanish. It also adds a Middle Eastern or North African racial category.
“With the new standards, what we do anticipate seeing is less people selecting some other race so you are more able to have a clearer understanding of the underlying demographies of districts,” said Anand. “And to have that clearer picture of the congregations and concentrations of race and ethnicities without having that more loose category muddying up the data.”
America’s increasing racial diversity has heavily influenced redistricting across the country. Though there’s been a decrease in majority-Black districts, Latino and Asian-American voters have seen increased representation, according to a 2023 analysis from the now-defunct publication FiveThirtyEight.
“SPD 15 is something we can and should and need to be doing to avoid a situation in which communities may be undercounted and continue to remain historically invisible,” said Goldstein. “The goal of SPD 15 is to change the course of history, where communities have been invisible, for political representation and in terms of resource allocation.”
But Project 2025, the sweeping Heritage Foundation policy initiative that’s guiding many aspects of Trump’s second administration, directly targeted SPD 15 for “review.”
“A new conservative Administration should take control of this process and thoroughly review any changes,” the document’s authors said of the directive revisions. “There are concerns among conservatives that the data under Biden Administration proposals could be skewed to bolster progressive political agendas.”
The Trump team appears to be taking this advice to heart at the same time it is seeking to diminish minority communities’ political and economic power in other ways.
Typically, redistricting is done every 10 years based on the results of the decennial census. But this administration is pushing states to engage in unprecedented mid-cycle redistricting now, while also delaying the implementation of SPD 15. That, in turn, could impact the 2030 census results, which could fail to capture the true diversity of America’s communities, and therefore impact how new maps are drawn in response.
In August, Trump said congressional Republicans “are entitled to five more seats,” in Texas, kicking off a monthslong tit-for-tat that’s seen Democrats organizing around partisan map redrawing to counter new, pro-Republican maps. Red states like Texas, Missouri and Indiana are adapting new GOP-friendly maps, while California, Virginia and other blue states are attempting to alter their own maps in response.
None of this bodes well for fair representation of minority voters, Sara Rohani, assistant counsel at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, noting thatBlack people are historically undercounted in the census.
“Fair political representation, access to government services, and effective enforcement of civil rights laws,” said Rohani, who participated in a case challenging Louisiana’s congressional map for anti-Black racial bias, “all depend on this accurate census count.”
The U.S. Census Bureau did not return a request for comment on whether SPD 15 would be deployed in time for the 2030 Census. OMB and the White House also did not return TPM requests for comment.
“Our communities have been here for 50 years,” said Dinh of the Southeast Asian community specifically. But even now, she continued, “Wwe see that our communities are now facing intergenerational poverty,” she continued.. “We’re seeing intergenerational inequity in terms of educational attainment.”
SPD 15 was created to address those kinds of issues, allowing for more targeted government policy and for more fine-grained publicly available data used by researchers and community groups.
“The delay of SPD 15 means we don’t have access to realtime data,” Dinh said, “that can really save lives right now.
Inaccurate Race and Ethnicity Date Could Have a Big Impact on Political Representation
The delayed implementation of SPD 15 also coincides with the GOP’s latest efforts to engage in hyper-partisan gerrymandering. And while it’s not entirely clear what implications the directive, or its delay, will have on the way in which districts are drawn post-census, advocates are raising the alarm because of Trump and the GOP’s frequent use of race and ethnicity data to further their political aims, including through racial gerrymandering.
At Trump’s direction, state legislatures are aggressively pursuing new Republican-friendly political maps in red states ahead of the 2026 midterms. At the same time, the Supreme Court appears poised to overturn Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which has historically prevented the dilution of the collective electoral power of racial minorities. That outcome would likely allow Republicans to pick up at least 19 more seats in the U.S. House, according to one analysis. It would also make it more challenging for both the federal government and voting rights groups to challenge alleged racial gerrymanders.
Because of the role race plays in redistricting considerations, delaying the implementation of best-practice race and ethnicity data collection will muddy the information available about majority-minority areas — which also tend to support Democrats — when it next comes time to draw political maps.
“Census data, which includes SPD 15, is a huge determinant in how voting districts are drawn and, beyond just how the districts are drawn, that census data is critical in determining how federal funds are distributed,” said Gaby Goldstein, founder of State Futures, a policy organization focused on state government.
Dinh sees the delayed implementation of SPD 15 as potentially of a piece with “a long term effort to chip away and potentially impact the 2030 Census.”
“It’s certainly possible that the administration is trying to delay the release of detailed data about racial communities that could hinder their redistricting in Republican states,” she told TPM.
A Conservative Assault on the Census
The campaign for updates to federal race and ethnicity survey standards initially began under President Barack Obama’s administration in 2016, but stalled in 2017 after Trump in his first administration delayed consideration of the changes indefinitely. The updates were renewed under Biden, prompted in part by the 2020 Census results, which saw members of many communities start writing in their ethnicities: Cambodian, Laotian, Haitian, Armenian, Israeli.
The “huge uptick” in additional ethnic identification responses wasere “a huge sign that the forms weren’t giving people the ability to identify themselves in the way they view themselves,” Meeta Anand, director for census and data equity at the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights.
By June 2022, OMB announced its intention to revise the federal race and ethnicity data collection protocol. Initial revisions were published the following January and finalized by March 2024. They were the result, according to an OMB webpage about the policy, of 20,000 public comments, 94 listening sessions, three townhalls, a tribal consultation and the contributions of government staff from 35 agencies. The new rule combines race and ethnicity survey questions into one prompt, and encourages respondents to select every option they use to self-identify, writing in additional ethnicity categories if necessary. For example, a Hispanic American could self-identify as Dominican, Guatemalan, or Spanish. It also adds a Middle Eastern or North African racial category.
“With the new standards, what we do anticipate seeing is less people selecting some other race so you are more able to have a clearer understanding of the underlying demographies of districts,” said Anand. “And to have that clearer picture of the congregations and concentrations of race and ethnicities without having that more loose category muddying up the data.”
America’s increasing racial diversity has heavily influenced redistricting across the country. Though there’s been a decrease in majority-Black districts, Latino and Asian-American voters have seen increased representation, according to a 2023 analysis from the now-defunct publication FiveThirtyEight.
“SPD 15 is something we can and should and need to be doing to avoid a situation in which communities may be undercounted and continue to remain historically invisible,” said Goldstein. “The goal of SPD 15 is to change the course of history, where communities have been invisible, for political representation and in terms of resource allocation.”
But Project 2025, the sweeping Heritage Foundation policy initiative that’s guiding many aspects of Trump’s second administration, directly targeted SPD 15 for “review.”
“A new conservative Administration should take control of this process and thoroughly review any changes,” the document’s authors said of the directive revisions. “There are concerns among conservatives that the data under Biden Administration proposals could be skewed to bolster progressive political agendas.”
The Trump team appears to be taking this advice to heart at the same time it is seeking to diminish minority communities’ political and economic power in other ways.
Typically, redistricting is done every 10 years based on the results of the decennial census. But this administration is pushing states to engage in unprecedented mid-cycle redistricting now, while also delaying the implementation of SPD 15. That, in turn, could impact the 2030 census results, which could fail to capture the true diversity of America’s communities, and therefore impact how new maps are drawn in response.
In August, Trump said congressional Republicans “are entitled to five more seats,” in Texas, kicking off a monthslong tit-for-tat that’s seen Democrats organizing around partisan map redrawing to counter new, pro-Republican maps. Red states like Texas, Missouri and Indiana are adapting new GOP-friendly maps, while California, Virginia and other blue states are attempting to alter their own maps in response.
None of this bodes well for fair representation of minority voters, Sara Rohani, assistant counsel at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, noting thatBlack people are historically undercounted in the census.
“Fair political representation, access to government services, and effective enforcement of civil rights laws,” said Rohani, who participated in a case challenging Louisiana’s congressional map for anti-Black racial bias, “all depend on this accurate census count.”
SPD 15 appears to be another target. Under the directive, federal departments and agencies were initially supposed to have their action plans for policy’s implementation done by last month; they will now have until March 2026, according to the OMB website. All federal race and ethnicity data collections were initially supposed to be “consistent with the updated standards” by March 2029, but that deadline has been pushed to September 2029, well after the 2030 Census process is set to begin.
The U.S. Census Bureau did not return a request for comment on whether SPD 15 would be deployed in time for the 2030 Census. OMB and the White House also did not return TPM requests for comment.
“Our communities have been here for 50 years,” said Dinh of the Southeast Asian community specifically. But even now, she continued, “Wwe see that our communities are now facing intergenerational poverty,” she continued.. “We’re seeing intergenerational inequity in terms of educational attainment.”
SPD 15 was created to address those kinds of issues, allowing for more targeted government policy and for more fine-grained publicly available data used by researchers and community groups.
“The delay of SPD 15 means we don’t have access to realtime data,” Dinh said, “that can really save lives right now.
Inaccurate Race and Ethnicity Date Could Have a Big Impact on Political Representation
The delayed implementation of SPD 15 also coincides with the GOP’s latest efforts to engage in hyper-partisan gerrymandering. And while it’s not entirely clear what implications the directive, or its delay, will have on the way in which districts are drawn post-census, advocates are raising the alarm because of Trump and the GOP’s frequent use of race and ethnicity data to further their political aims, including through racial gerrymandering.
At Trump’s direction, state legislatures are aggressively pursuing new Republican-friendly political maps in red states ahead of the 2026 midterms. At the same time, the Supreme Court appears poised to overturn Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which has historically prevented the dilution of the collective electoral power of racial minorities. That outcome would likely allow Republicans to pick up at least 19 more seats in the U.S. House, according to one analysis. It would also make it more challenging for both the federal government and voting rights groups to challenge alleged racial gerrymanders.
Because of the role race plays in redistricting considerations, delaying the implementation of best-practice race and ethnicity data collection will muddy the information available about majority-minority areas — which also tend to support Democrats — when it next comes time to draw political maps.
“Census data, which includes SPD 15, is a huge determinant in how voting districts are drawn and, beyond just how the districts are drawn, that census data is critical in determining how federal funds are distributed,” said Gaby Goldstein, founder of State Futures, a policy organization focused on state government.
Dinh sees the delayed implementation of SPD 15 as potentially of a piece with “a long term effort to chip away and potentially impact the 2030 Census.”
“It’s certainly possible that the administration is trying to delay the release of detailed data about racial communities that could hinder their redistricting in Republican states,” she told TPM.
A Conservative Assault on the Census
The campaign for updates to federal race and ethnicity survey standards initially began under President Barack Obama’s administration in 2016, but stalled in 2017 after Trump in his first administration delayed consideration of the changes indefinitely. The updates were renewed under Biden, prompted in part by the 2020 Census results, which saw members of many communities start writing in their ethnicities: Cambodian, Laotian, Haitian, Armenian, Israeli.
The “huge uptick” in additional ethnic identification responses wasere “a huge sign that the forms weren’t giving people the ability to identify themselves in the way they view themselves,” Meeta Anand, director for census and data equity at the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights.
By June 2022, OMB announced its intention to revise the federal race and ethnicity data collection protocol. Initial revisions were published the following January and finalized by March 2024. They were the result, according to an OMB webpage about the policy, of 20,000 public comments, 94 listening sessions, three townhalls, a tribal consultation and the contributions of government staff from 35 agencies. The new rule combines race and ethnicity survey questions into one prompt, and encourages respondents to select every option they use to self-identify, writing in additional ethnicity categories if necessary. For example, a Hispanic American could self-identify as Dominican, Guatemalan, or Spanish. It also adds a Middle Eastern or North African racial category.
“With the new standards, what we do anticipate seeing is less people selecting some other race so you are more able to have a clearer understanding of the underlying demographies of districts,” said Anand. “And to have that clearer picture of the congregations and concentrations of race and ethnicities without having that more loose category muddying up the data.”
America’s increasing racial diversity has heavily influenced redistricting across the country. Though there’s been a decrease in majority-Black districts, Latino and Asian-American voters have seen increased representation, according to a 2023 analysis from the now-defunct publication FiveThirtyEight.
“SPD 15 is something we can and should and need to be doing to avoid a situation in which communities may be undercounted and continue to remain historically invisible,” said Goldstein. “The goal of SPD 15 is to change the course of history, where communities have been invisible, for political representation and in terms of resource allocation.”
But Project 2025, the sweeping Heritage Foundation policy initiative that’s guiding many aspects of Trump’s second administration, directly targeted SPD 15 for “review.”
“A new conservative Administration should take control of this process and thoroughly review any changes,” the document’s authors said of the directive revisions. “There are concerns among conservatives that the data under Biden Administration proposals could be skewed to bolster progressive political agendas.”
The Trump team appears to be taking this advice to heart at the same time it is seeking to diminish minority communities’ political and economic power in other ways.
Typically, redistricting is done every 10 years based on the results of the decennial census. But this administration is pushing states to engage in unprecedented mid-cycle redistricting now, while also delaying the implementation of SPD 15. That, in turn, could impact the 2030 census results, which could fail to capture the true diversity of America’s communities, and therefore impact how new maps are drawn in response.
In August, Trump said congressional Republicans “are entitled to five more seats,” in Texas, kicking off a monthslong tit-for-tat that’s seen Democrats organizing around partisan map redrawing to counter new, pro-Republican maps. Red states like Texas, Missouri and Indiana are adapting new GOP-friendly maps, while California, Virginia and other blue states are attempting to alter their own maps in response.
None of this bodes well for fair representation of minority voters, Sara Rohani, assistant counsel at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, noting thatBlack people are historically undercounted in the census.
“Fair political representation, access to government services, and effective enforcement of civil rights laws,” said Rohani, who participated in a case challenging Louisiana’s congressional map for anti-Black racial bias, “all depend on this accurate census count.”
But President Donald Trump’s second administration has been decidedly hostile toward such measures of diversity. It has removed demographic information like race and gender from official statistics. It has wiped race and ethnicity data from a public database showing the demographics of federal employees. And it has called on the federal government and government contractors to ignore information on racial equity in hiring, revoking equity-focused executive orders dating back decades.
SPD 15 appears to be another target. Under the directive, federal departments and agencies were initially supposed to have their action plans for policy’s implementation done by last month; they will now have until March 2026, according to the OMB website. All federal race and ethnicity data collections were initially supposed to be “consistent with the updated standards” by March 2029, but that deadline has been pushed to September 2029, well after the 2030 Census process is set to begin.
The U.S. Census Bureau did not return a request for comment on whether SPD 15 would be deployed in time for the 2030 Census. OMB and the White House also did not return TPM requests for comment.
“Our communities have been here for 50 years,” said Dinh of the Southeast Asian community specifically. But even now, she continued, “Wwe see that our communities are now facing intergenerational poverty,” she continued.. “We’re seeing intergenerational inequity in terms of educational attainment.”
SPD 15 was created to address those kinds of issues, allowing for more targeted government policy and for more fine-grained publicly available data used by researchers and community groups.
“The delay of SPD 15 means we don’t have access to realtime data,” Dinh said, “that can really save lives right now.
Inaccurate Race and Ethnicity Date Could Have a Big Impact on Political Representation
The delayed implementation of SPD 15 also coincides with the GOP’s latest efforts to engage in hyper-partisan gerrymandering. And while it’s not entirely clear what implications the directive, or its delay, will have on the way in which districts are drawn post-census, advocates are raising the alarm because of Trump and the GOP’s frequent use of race and ethnicity data to further their political aims, including through racial gerrymandering.
At Trump’s direction, state legislatures are aggressively pursuing new Republican-friendly political maps in red states ahead of the 2026 midterms. At the same time, the Supreme Court appears poised to overturn Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which has historically prevented the dilution of the collective electoral power of racial minorities. That outcome would likely allow Republicans to pick up at least 19 more seats in the U.S. House, according to one analysis. It would also make it more challenging for both the federal government and voting rights groups to challenge alleged racial gerrymanders.
Because of the role race plays in redistricting considerations, delaying the implementation of best-practice race and ethnicity data collection will muddy the information available about majority-minority areas — which also tend to support Democrats — when it next comes time to draw political maps.
“Census data, which includes SPD 15, is a huge determinant in how voting districts are drawn and, beyond just how the districts are drawn, that census data is critical in determining how federal funds are distributed,” said Gaby Goldstein, founder of State Futures, a policy organization focused on state government.
Dinh sees the delayed implementation of SPD 15 as potentially of a piece with “a long term effort to chip away and potentially impact the 2030 Census.”
“It’s certainly possible that the administration is trying to delay the release of detailed data about racial communities that could hinder their redistricting in Republican states,” she told TPM.
A Conservative Assault on the Census
The campaign for updates to federal race and ethnicity survey standards initially began under President Barack Obama’s administration in 2016, but stalled in 2017 after Trump in his first administration delayed consideration of the changes indefinitely. The updates were renewed under Biden, prompted in part by the 2020 Census results, which saw members of many communities start writing in their ethnicities: Cambodian, Laotian, Haitian, Armenian, Israeli.
The “huge uptick” in additional ethnic identification responses wasere “a huge sign that the forms weren’t giving people the ability to identify themselves in the way they view themselves,” Meeta Anand, director for census and data equity at the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights.
By June 2022, OMB announced its intention to revise the federal race and ethnicity data collection protocol. Initial revisions were published the following January and finalized by March 2024. They were the result, according to an OMB webpage about the policy, of 20,000 public comments, 94 listening sessions, three townhalls, a tribal consultation and the contributions of government staff from 35 agencies. The new rule combines race and ethnicity survey questions into one prompt, and encourages respondents to select every option they use to self-identify, writing in additional ethnicity categories if necessary. For example, a Hispanic American could self-identify as Dominican, Guatemalan, or Spanish. It also adds a Middle Eastern or North African racial category.
“With the new standards, what we do anticipate seeing is less people selecting some other race so you are more able to have a clearer understanding of the underlying demographies of districts,” said Anand. “And to have that clearer picture of the congregations and concentrations of race and ethnicities without having that more loose category muddying up the data.”
America’s increasing racial diversity has heavily influenced redistricting across the country. Though there’s been a decrease in majority-Black districts, Latino and Asian-American voters have seen increased representation, according to a 2023 analysis from the now-defunct publication FiveThirtyEight.
“SPD 15 is something we can and should and need to be doing to avoid a situation in which communities may be undercounted and continue to remain historically invisible,” said Goldstein. “The goal of SPD 15 is to change the course of history, where communities have been invisible, for political representation and in terms of resource allocation.”
But Project 2025, the sweeping Heritage Foundation policy initiative that’s guiding many aspects of Trump’s second administration, directly targeted SPD 15 for “review.”
“A new conservative Administration should take control of this process and thoroughly review any changes,” the document’s authors said of the directive revisions. “There are concerns among conservatives that the data under Biden Administration proposals could be skewed to bolster progressive political agendas.”
The Trump team appears to be taking this advice to heart at the same time it is seeking to diminish minority communities’ political and economic power in other ways.
Typically, redistricting is done every 10 years based on the results of the decennial census. But this administration is pushing states to engage in unprecedented mid-cycle redistricting now, while also delaying the implementation of SPD 15. That, in turn, could impact the 2030 census results, which could fail to capture the true diversity of America’s communities, and therefore impact how new maps are drawn in response.
In August, Trump said congressional Republicans “are entitled to five more seats,” in Texas, kicking off a monthslong tit-for-tat that’s seen Democrats organizing around partisan map redrawing to counter new, pro-Republican maps. Red states like Texas, Missouri and Indiana are adapting new GOP-friendly maps, while California, Virginia and other blue states are attempting to alter their own maps in response.
None of this bodes well for fair representation of minority voters, Sara Rohani, assistant counsel at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, noting thatBlack people are historically undercounted in the census.
“Fair political representation, access to government services, and effective enforcement of civil rights laws,” said Rohani, who participated in a case challenging Louisiana’s congressional map for anti-Black racial bias, “all depend on this accurate census count.”
“When the Census 2030 Advisory Committee was still intact and when I was still a member of the committee, there was a lot of support from the Census Bureau for SPD 15,” Dinh told TPM.
But President Donald Trump’s second administration has been decidedly hostile toward such measures of diversity. It has removed demographic information like race and gender from official statistics. It has wiped race and ethnicity data from a public database showing the demographics of federal employees. And it has called on the federal government and government contractors to ignore information on racial equity in hiring, revoking equity-focused executive orders dating back decades.
SPD 15 appears to be another target. Under the directive, federal departments and agencies were initially supposed to have their action plans for policy’s implementation done by last month; they will now have until March 2026, according to the OMB website. All federal race and ethnicity data collections were initially supposed to be “consistent with the updated standards” by March 2029, but that deadline has been pushed to September 2029, well after the 2030 Census process is set to begin.
The U.S. Census Bureau did not return a request for comment on whether SPD 15 would be deployed in time for the 2030 Census. OMB and the White House also did not return TPM requests for comment.
“Our communities have been here for 50 years,” said Dinh of the Southeast Asian community specifically. But even now, she continued, “Wwe see that our communities are now facing intergenerational poverty,” she continued.. “We’re seeing intergenerational inequity in terms of educational attainment.”
SPD 15 was created to address those kinds of issues, allowing for more targeted government policy and for more fine-grained publicly available data used by researchers and community groups.
“The delay of SPD 15 means we don’t have access to realtime data,” Dinh said, “that can really save lives right now.
Inaccurate Race and Ethnicity Date Could Have a Big Impact on Political Representation
The delayed implementation of SPD 15 also coincides with the GOP’s latest efforts to engage in hyper-partisan gerrymandering. And while it’s not entirely clear what implications the directive, or its delay, will have on the way in which districts are drawn post-census, advocates are raising the alarm because of Trump and the GOP’s frequent use of race and ethnicity data to further their political aims, including through racial gerrymandering.
At Trump’s direction, state legislatures are aggressively pursuing new Republican-friendly political maps in red states ahead of the 2026 midterms. At the same time, the Supreme Court appears poised to overturn Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which has historically prevented the dilution of the collective electoral power of racial minorities. That outcome would likely allow Republicans to pick up at least 19 more seats in the U.S. House, according to one analysis. It would also make it more challenging for both the federal government and voting rights groups to challenge alleged racial gerrymanders.
Because of the role race plays in redistricting considerations, delaying the implementation of best-practice race and ethnicity data collection will muddy the information available about majority-minority areas — which also tend to support Democrats — when it next comes time to draw political maps.
“Census data, which includes SPD 15, is a huge determinant in how voting districts are drawn and, beyond just how the districts are drawn, that census data is critical in determining how federal funds are distributed,” said Gaby Goldstein, founder of State Futures, a policy organization focused on state government.
Dinh sees the delayed implementation of SPD 15 as potentially of a piece with “a long term effort to chip away and potentially impact the 2030 Census.”
“It’s certainly possible that the administration is trying to delay the release of detailed data about racial communities that could hinder their redistricting in Republican states,” she told TPM.
A Conservative Assault on the Census
The campaign for updates to federal race and ethnicity survey standards initially began under President Barack Obama’s administration in 2016, but stalled in 2017 after Trump in his first administration delayed consideration of the changes indefinitely. The updates were renewed under Biden, prompted in part by the 2020 Census results, which saw members of many communities start writing in their ethnicities: Cambodian, Laotian, Haitian, Armenian, Israeli.
The “huge uptick” in additional ethnic identification responses wasere “a huge sign that the forms weren’t giving people the ability to identify themselves in the way they view themselves,” Meeta Anand, director for census and data equity at the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights.
By June 2022, OMB announced its intention to revise the federal race and ethnicity data collection protocol. Initial revisions were published the following January and finalized by March 2024. They were the result, according to an OMB webpage about the policy, of 20,000 public comments, 94 listening sessions, three townhalls, a tribal consultation and the contributions of government staff from 35 agencies. The new rule combines race and ethnicity survey questions into one prompt, and encourages respondents to select every option they use to self-identify, writing in additional ethnicity categories if necessary. For example, a Hispanic American could self-identify as Dominican, Guatemalan, or Spanish. It also adds a Middle Eastern or North African racial category.
“With the new standards, what we do anticipate seeing is less people selecting some other race so you are more able to have a clearer understanding of the underlying demographies of districts,” said Anand. “And to have that clearer picture of the congregations and concentrations of race and ethnicities without having that more loose category muddying up the data.”
America’s increasing racial diversity has heavily influenced redistricting across the country. Though there’s been a decrease in majority-Black districts, Latino and Asian-American voters have seen increased representation, according to a 2023 analysis from the now-defunct publication FiveThirtyEight.
“SPD 15 is something we can and should and need to be doing to avoid a situation in which communities may be undercounted and continue to remain historically invisible,” said Goldstein. “The goal of SPD 15 is to change the course of history, where communities have been invisible, for political representation and in terms of resource allocation.”
But Project 2025, the sweeping Heritage Foundation policy initiative that’s guiding many aspects of Trump’s second administration, directly targeted SPD 15 for “review.”
“A new conservative Administration should take control of this process and thoroughly review any changes,” the document’s authors said of the directive revisions. “There are concerns among conservatives that the data under Biden Administration proposals could be skewed to bolster progressive political agendas.”
The Trump team appears to be taking this advice to heart at the same time it is seeking to diminish minority communities’ political and economic power in other ways.
Typically, redistricting is done every 10 years based on the results of the decennial census. But this administration is pushing states to engage in unprecedented mid-cycle redistricting now, while also delaying the implementation of SPD 15. That, in turn, could impact the 2030 census results, which could fail to capture the true diversity of America’s communities, and therefore impact how new maps are drawn in response.
In August, Trump said congressional Republicans “are entitled to five more seats,” in Texas, kicking off a monthslong tit-for-tat that’s seen Democrats organizing around partisan map redrawing to counter new, pro-Republican maps. Red states like Texas, Missouri and Indiana are adapting new GOP-friendly maps, while California, Virginia and other blue states are attempting to alter their own maps in response.
None of this bodes well for fair representation of minority voters, Sara Rohani, assistant counsel at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, noting thatBlack people are historically undercounted in the census.
“Fair political representation, access to government services, and effective enforcement of civil rights laws,” said Rohani, who participated in a case challenging Louisiana’s congressional map for anti-Black racial bias, “all depend on this accurate census count.”
SPD 15 was intended to be an update to the way the agencies across the federal government collect standardized race and ethnicity data,, helping researchers and policymakers better understand the ethnic makeup of communities, to cultivate more effective policy, and to facilitate more targeted resource allocation.
“When the Census 2030 Advisory Committee was still intact and when I was still a member of the committee, there was a lot of support from the Census Bureau for SPD 15,” Dinh told TPM.
But President Donald Trump’s second administration has been decidedly hostile toward such measures of diversity. It has removed demographic information like race and gender from official statistics. It has wiped race and ethnicity data from a public database showing the demographics of federal employees. And it has called on the federal government and government contractors to ignore information on racial equity in hiring, revoking equity-focused executive orders dating back decades.
SPD 15 appears to be another target. Under the directive, federal departments and agencies were initially supposed to have their action plans for policy’s implementation done by last month; they will now have until March 2026, according to the OMB website. All federal race and ethnicity data collections were initially supposed to be “consistent with the updated standards” by March 2029, but that deadline has been pushed to September 2029, well after the 2030 Census process is set to begin.
The U.S. Census Bureau did not return a request for comment on whether SPD 15 would be deployed in time for the 2030 Census. OMB and the White House also did not return TPM requests for comment.
“Our communities have been here for 50 years,” said Dinh of the Southeast Asian community specifically. But even now, she continued, “Wwe see that our communities are now facing intergenerational poverty,” she continued.. “We’re seeing intergenerational inequity in terms of educational attainment.”
SPD 15 was created to address those kinds of issues, allowing for more targeted government policy and for more fine-grained publicly available data used by researchers and community groups.
“The delay of SPD 15 means we don’t have access to realtime data,” Dinh said, “that can really save lives right now.
Inaccurate Race and Ethnicity Date Could Have a Big Impact on Political Representation
The delayed implementation of SPD 15 also coincides with the GOP’s latest efforts to engage in hyper-partisan gerrymandering. And while it’s not entirely clear what implications the directive, or its delay, will have on the way in which districts are drawn post-census, advocates are raising the alarm because of Trump and the GOP’s frequent use of race and ethnicity data to further their political aims, including through racial gerrymandering.
At Trump’s direction, state legislatures are aggressively pursuing new Republican-friendly political maps in red states ahead of the 2026 midterms. At the same time, the Supreme Court appears poised to overturn Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which has historically prevented the dilution of the collective electoral power of racial minorities. That outcome would likely allow Republicans to pick up at least 19 more seats in the U.S. House, according to one analysis. It would also make it more challenging for both the federal government and voting rights groups to challenge alleged racial gerrymanders.
Because of the role race plays in redistricting considerations, delaying the implementation of best-practice race and ethnicity data collection will muddy the information available about majority-minority areas — which also tend to support Democrats — when it next comes time to draw political maps.
“Census data, which includes SPD 15, is a huge determinant in how voting districts are drawn and, beyond just how the districts are drawn, that census data is critical in determining how federal funds are distributed,” said Gaby Goldstein, founder of State Futures, a policy organization focused on state government.
Dinh sees the delayed implementation of SPD 15 as potentially of a piece with “a long term effort to chip away and potentially impact the 2030 Census.”
“It’s certainly possible that the administration is trying to delay the release of detailed data about racial communities that could hinder their redistricting in Republican states,” she told TPM.
A Conservative Assault on the Census
The campaign for updates to federal race and ethnicity survey standards initially began under President Barack Obama’s administration in 2016, but stalled in 2017 after Trump in his first administration delayed consideration of the changes indefinitely. The updates were renewed under Biden, prompted in part by the 2020 Census results, which saw members of many communities start writing in their ethnicities: Cambodian, Laotian, Haitian, Armenian, Israeli.
The “huge uptick” in additional ethnic identification responses wasere “a huge sign that the forms weren’t giving people the ability to identify themselves in the way they view themselves,” Meeta Anand, director for census and data equity at the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights.
By June 2022, OMB announced its intention to revise the federal race and ethnicity data collection protocol. Initial revisions were published the following January and finalized by March 2024. They were the result, according to an OMB webpage about the policy, of 20,000 public comments, 94 listening sessions, three townhalls, a tribal consultation and the contributions of government staff from 35 agencies. The new rule combines race and ethnicity survey questions into one prompt, and encourages respondents to select every option they use to self-identify, writing in additional ethnicity categories if necessary. For example, a Hispanic American could self-identify as Dominican, Guatemalan, or Spanish. It also adds a Middle Eastern or North African racial category.
“With the new standards, what we do anticipate seeing is less people selecting some other race so you are more able to have a clearer understanding of the underlying demographies of districts,” said Anand. “And to have that clearer picture of the congregations and concentrations of race and ethnicities without having that more loose category muddying up the data.”
America’s increasing racial diversity has heavily influenced redistricting across the country. Though there’s been a decrease in majority-Black districts, Latino and Asian-American voters have seen increased representation, according to a 2023 analysis from the now-defunct publication FiveThirtyEight.
“SPD 15 is something we can and should and need to be doing to avoid a situation in which communities may be undercounted and continue to remain historically invisible,” said Goldstein. “The goal of SPD 15 is to change the course of history, where communities have been invisible, for political representation and in terms of resource allocation.”
But Project 2025, the sweeping Heritage Foundation policy initiative that’s guiding many aspects of Trump’s second administration, directly targeted SPD 15 for “review.”
“A new conservative Administration should take control of this process and thoroughly review any changes,” the document’s authors said of the directive revisions. “There are concerns among conservatives that the data under Biden Administration proposals could be skewed to bolster progressive political agendas.”
The Trump team appears to be taking this advice to heart at the same time it is seeking to diminish minority communities’ political and economic power in other ways.
Typically, redistricting is done every 10 years based on the results of the decennial census. But this administration is pushing states to engage in unprecedented mid-cycle redistricting now, while also delaying the implementation of SPD 15. That, in turn, could impact the 2030 census results, which could fail to capture the true diversity of America’s communities, and therefore impact how new maps are drawn in response.
In August, Trump said congressional Republicans “are entitled to five more seats,” in Texas, kicking off a monthslong tit-for-tat that’s seen Democrats organizing around partisan map redrawing to counter new, pro-Republican maps. Red states like Texas, Missouri and Indiana are adapting new GOP-friendly maps, while California, Virginia and other blue states are attempting to alter their own maps in response.
None of this bodes well for fair representation of minority voters, Sara Rohani, assistant counsel at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, noting thatBlack people are historically undercounted in the census.
“Fair political representation, access to government services, and effective enforcement of civil rights laws,” said Rohani, who participated in a case challenging Louisiana’s congressional map for anti-Black racial bias, “all depend on this accurate census count.”
SPD 15 was intended to be an update to the way the agencies across the federal government collect standardized race and ethnicity data,, helping researchers and policymakers better understand the ethnic makeup of communities, to cultivate more effective policy, and to facilitate more targeted resource allocation.
“When the Census 2030 Advisory Committee was still intact and when I was still a member of the committee, there was a lot of support from the Census Bureau for SPD 15,” Dinh told TPM.
But President Donald Trump’s second administration has been decidedly hostile toward such measures of diversity. It has removed demographic information like race and gender from official statistics. It has wiped race and ethnicity data from a public database showing the demographics of federal employees. And it has called on the federal government and government contractors to ignore information on racial equity in hiring, revoking equity-focused executive orders dating back decades.
SPD 15 appears to be another target. Under the directive, federal departments and agencies were initially supposed to have their action plans for policy’s implementation done by last month; they will now have until March 2026, according to the OMB website. All federal race and ethnicity data collections were initially supposed to be “consistent with the updated standards” by March 2029, but that deadline has been pushed to September 2029, well after the 2030 Census process is set to begin.
The U.S. Census Bureau did not return a request for comment on whether SPD 15 would be deployed in time for the 2030 Census. OMB and the White House also did not return TPM requests for comment.
“Our communities have been here for 50 years,” said Dinh of the Southeast Asian community specifically. But even now, she continued, “Wwe see that our communities are now facing intergenerational poverty,” she continued.. “We’re seeing intergenerational inequity in terms of educational attainment.”
SPD 15 was created to address those kinds of issues, allowing for more targeted government policy and for more fine-grained publicly available data used by researchers and community groups.
“The delay of SPD 15 means we don’t have access to realtime data,” Dinh said, “that can really save lives right now.
Inaccurate Race and Ethnicity Date Could Have a Big Impact on Political Representation
The delayed implementation of SPD 15 also coincides with the GOP’s latest efforts to engage in hyper-partisan gerrymandering. And while it’s not entirely clear what implications the directive, or its delay, will have on the way in which districts are drawn post-census, advocates are raising the alarm because of Trump and the GOP’s frequent use of race and ethnicity data to further their political aims, including through racial gerrymandering.
At Trump’s direction, state legislatures are aggressively pursuing new Republican-friendly political maps in red states ahead of the 2026 midterms. At the same time, the Supreme Court appears poised to overturn Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which has historically prevented the dilution of the collective electoral power of racial minorities. That outcome would likely allow Republicans to pick up at least 19 more seats in the U.S. House, according to one analysis. It would also make it more challenging for both the federal government and voting rights groups to challenge alleged racial gerrymanders.
Because of the role race plays in redistricting considerations, delaying the implementation of best-practice race and ethnicity data collection will muddy the information available about majority-minority areas — which also tend to support Democrats — when it next comes time to draw political maps.
“Census data, which includes SPD 15, is a huge determinant in how voting districts are drawn and, beyond just how the districts are drawn, that census data is critical in determining how federal funds are distributed,” said Gaby Goldstein, founder of State Futures, a policy organization focused on state government.
Dinh sees the delayed implementation of SPD 15 as potentially of a piece with “a long term effort to chip away and potentially impact the 2030 Census.”
“It’s certainly possible that the administration is trying to delay the release of detailed data about racial communities that could hinder their redistricting in Republican states,” she told TPM.
A Conservative Assault on the Census
The campaign for updates to federal race and ethnicity survey standards initially began under President Barack Obama’s administration in 2016, but stalled in 2017 after Trump in his first administration delayed consideration of the changes indefinitely. The updates were renewed under Biden, prompted in part by the 2020 Census results, which saw members of many communities start writing in their ethnicities: Cambodian, Laotian, Haitian, Armenian, Israeli.
The “huge uptick” in additional ethnic identification responses wasere “a huge sign that the forms weren’t giving people the ability to identify themselves in the way they view themselves,” Meeta Anand, director for census and data equity at the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights.
By June 2022, OMB announced its intention to revise the federal race and ethnicity data collection protocol. Initial revisions were published the following January and finalized by March 2024. They were the result, according to an OMB webpage about the policy, of 20,000 public comments, 94 listening sessions, three townhalls, a tribal consultation and the contributions of government staff from 35 agencies. The new rule combines race and ethnicity survey questions into one prompt, and encourages respondents to select every option they use to self-identify, writing in additional ethnicity categories if necessary. For example, a Hispanic American could self-identify as Dominican, Guatemalan, or Spanish. It also adds a Middle Eastern or North African racial category.
“With the new standards, what we do anticipate seeing is less people selecting some other race so you are more able to have a clearer understanding of the underlying demographies of districts,” said Anand. “And to have that clearer picture of the congregations and concentrations of race and ethnicities without having that more loose category muddying up the data.”
America’s increasing racial diversity has heavily influenced redistricting across the country. Though there’s been a decrease in majority-Black districts, Latino and Asian-American voters have seen increased representation, according to a 2023 analysis from the now-defunct publication FiveThirtyEight.
“SPD 15 is something we can and should and need to be doing to avoid a situation in which communities may be undercounted and continue to remain historically invisible,” said Goldstein. “The goal of SPD 15 is to change the course of history, where communities have been invisible, for political representation and in terms of resource allocation.”
But Project 2025, the sweeping Heritage Foundation policy initiative that’s guiding many aspects of Trump’s second administration, directly targeted SPD 15 for “review.”
“A new conservative Administration should take control of this process and thoroughly review any changes,” the document’s authors said of the directive revisions. “There are concerns among conservatives that the data under Biden Administration proposals could be skewed to bolster progressive political agendas.”
The Trump team appears to be taking this advice to heart at the same time it is seeking to diminish minority communities’ political and economic power in other ways.
Typically, redistricting is done every 10 years based on the results of the decennial census. But this administration is pushing states to engage in unprecedented mid-cycle redistricting now, while also delaying the implementation of SPD 15. That, in turn, could impact the 2030 census results, which could fail to capture the true diversity of America’s communities, and therefore impact how new maps are drawn in response.
In August, Trump said congressional Republicans “are entitled to five more seats,” in Texas, kicking off a monthslong tit-for-tat that’s seen Democrats organizing around partisan map redrawing to counter new, pro-Republican maps. Red states like Texas, Missouri and Indiana are adapting new GOP-friendly maps, while California, Virginia and other blue states are attempting to alter their own maps in response.
None of this bodes well for fair representation of minority voters, Sara Rohani, assistant counsel at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, noting thatBlack people are historically undercounted in the census.
“Fair political representation, access to government services, and effective enforcement of civil rights laws,” said Rohani, who participated in a case challenging Louisiana’s congressional map for anti-Black racial bias, “all depend on this accurate census count.”
But conservative activists swiftly targeted SPD 15, and the Trump administration has slow-rolled the initiative. The failure to adopt SPD 15 ahead of the 2030 Census — potentially coupled with a high-stakes Supreme Court case that threatens to dilute the power of minority voters and a Trump-led redistricting frenzy that may create a slew of new Republican districts across the U.S. — risks significantly further diminishing the political and economic power of non-white voters, experts tell TPM.
“The Trump Administration’s delay in implementing SPD 15 is the latest in its efforts to undermine the accuracy and utility of our nation’s nonpartisan data — and this is troubling,” Marina Jenkins, executive director at the National Redistricting Foundation, a good government group, told TPM in an email. “It is not a coincidence that this delay is happening at a time when Republicans across the country are working overtime to pass gerrymanders that silence millions of voters, particularly voters of color.”
What Is SPD 15 Supposed to Do?
SPD 15 was intended to be an update to the way the agencies across the federal government collect standardized race and ethnicity data,, helping researchers and policymakers better understand the ethnic makeup of communities, to cultivate more effective policy, and to facilitate more targeted resource allocation.
“When the Census 2030 Advisory Committee was still intact and when I was still a member of the committee, there was a lot of support from the Census Bureau for SPD 15,” Dinh told TPM.
But President Donald Trump’s second administration has been decidedly hostile toward such measures of diversity. It has removed demographic information like race and gender from official statistics. It has wiped race and ethnicity data from a public database showing the demographics of federal employees. And it has called on the federal government and government contractors to ignore information on racial equity in hiring, revoking equity-focused executive orders dating back decades.
SPD 15 appears to be another target. Under the directive, federal departments and agencies were initially supposed to have their action plans for policy’s implementation done by last month; they will now have until March 2026, according to the OMB website. All federal race and ethnicity data collections were initially supposed to be “consistent with the updated standards” by March 2029, but that deadline has been pushed to September 2029, well after the 2030 Census process is set to begin.
The U.S. Census Bureau did not return a request for comment on whether SPD 15 would be deployed in time for the 2030 Census. OMB and the White House also did not return TPM requests for comment.
“Our communities have been here for 50 years,” said Dinh of the Southeast Asian community specifically. But even now, she continued, “Wwe see that our communities are now facing intergenerational poverty,” she continued.. “We’re seeing intergenerational inequity in terms of educational attainment.”
SPD 15 was created to address those kinds of issues, allowing for more targeted government policy and for more fine-grained publicly available data used by researchers and community groups.
“The delay of SPD 15 means we don’t have access to realtime data,” Dinh said, “that can really save lives right now.
Inaccurate Race and Ethnicity Date Could Have a Big Impact on Political Representation
The delayed implementation of SPD 15 also coincides with the GOP’s latest efforts to engage in hyper-partisan gerrymandering. And while it’s not entirely clear what implications the directive, or its delay, will have on the way in which districts are drawn post-census, advocates are raising the alarm because of Trump and the GOP’s frequent use of race and ethnicity data to further their political aims, including through racial gerrymandering.
At Trump’s direction, state legislatures are aggressively pursuing new Republican-friendly political maps in red states ahead of the 2026 midterms. At the same time, the Supreme Court appears poised to overturn Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which has historically prevented the dilution of the collective electoral power of racial minorities. That outcome would likely allow Republicans to pick up at least 19 more seats in the U.S. House, according to one analysis. It would also make it more challenging for both the federal government and voting rights groups to challenge alleged racial gerrymanders.
Because of the role race plays in redistricting considerations, delaying the implementation of best-practice race and ethnicity data collection will muddy the information available about majority-minority areas — which also tend to support Democrats — when it next comes time to draw political maps.
“Census data, which includes SPD 15, is a huge determinant in how voting districts are drawn and, beyond just how the districts are drawn, that census data is critical in determining how federal funds are distributed,” said Gaby Goldstein, founder of State Futures, a policy organization focused on state government.
Dinh sees the delayed implementation of SPD 15 as potentially of a piece with “a long term effort to chip away and potentially impact the 2030 Census.”
“It’s certainly possible that the administration is trying to delay the release of detailed data about racial communities that could hinder their redistricting in Republican states,” she told TPM.
A Conservative Assault on the Census
The campaign for updates to federal race and ethnicity survey standards initially began under President Barack Obama’s administration in 2016, but stalled in 2017 after Trump in his first administration delayed consideration of the changes indefinitely. The updates were renewed under Biden, prompted in part by the 2020 Census results, which saw members of many communities start writing in their ethnicities: Cambodian, Laotian, Haitian, Armenian, Israeli.
The “huge uptick” in additional ethnic identification responses wasere “a huge sign that the forms weren’t giving people the ability to identify themselves in the way they view themselves,” Meeta Anand, director for census and data equity at the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights.
By June 2022, OMB announced its intention to revise the federal race and ethnicity data collection protocol. Initial revisions were published the following January and finalized by March 2024. They were the result, according to an OMB webpage about the policy, of 20,000 public comments, 94 listening sessions, three townhalls, a tribal consultation and the contributions of government staff from 35 agencies. The new rule combines race and ethnicity survey questions into one prompt, and encourages respondents to select every option they use to self-identify, writing in additional ethnicity categories if necessary. For example, a Hispanic American could self-identify as Dominican, Guatemalan, or Spanish. It also adds a Middle Eastern or North African racial category.
“With the new standards, what we do anticipate seeing is less people selecting some other race so you are more able to have a clearer understanding of the underlying demographies of districts,” said Anand. “And to have that clearer picture of the congregations and concentrations of race and ethnicities without having that more loose category muddying up the data.”
America’s increasing racial diversity has heavily influenced redistricting across the country. Though there’s been a decrease in majority-Black districts, Latino and Asian-American voters have seen increased representation, according to a 2023 analysis from the now-defunct publication FiveThirtyEight.
“SPD 15 is something we can and should and need to be doing to avoid a situation in which communities may be undercounted and continue to remain historically invisible,” said Goldstein. “The goal of SPD 15 is to change the course of history, where communities have been invisible, for political representation and in terms of resource allocation.”
But Project 2025, the sweeping Heritage Foundation policy initiative that’s guiding many aspects of Trump’s second administration, directly targeted SPD 15 for “review.”
“A new conservative Administration should take control of this process and thoroughly review any changes,” the document’s authors said of the directive revisions. “There are concerns among conservatives that the data under Biden Administration proposals could be skewed to bolster progressive political agendas.”
The Trump team appears to be taking this advice to heart at the same time it is seeking to diminish minority communities’ political and economic power in other ways.
Typically, redistricting is done every 10 years based on the results of the decennial census. But this administration is pushing states to engage in unprecedented mid-cycle redistricting now, while also delaying the implementation of SPD 15. That, in turn, could impact the 2030 census results, which could fail to capture the true diversity of America’s communities, and therefore impact how new maps are drawn in response.
In August, Trump said congressional Republicans “are entitled to five more seats,” in Texas, kicking off a monthslong tit-for-tat that’s seen Democrats organizing around partisan map redrawing to counter new, pro-Republican maps. Red states like Texas, Missouri and Indiana are adapting new GOP-friendly maps, while California, Virginia and other blue states are attempting to alter their own maps in response.
None of this bodes well for fair representation of minority voters, Sara Rohani, assistant counsel at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, noting thatBlack people are historically undercounted in the census.
“Fair political representation, access to government services, and effective enforcement of civil rights laws,” said Rohani, who participated in a case challenging Louisiana’s congressional map for anti-Black racial bias, “all depend on this accurate census count.”
Dinh had also been involved, through her role as executive director of the Southeast Asia Resource Action Center, in giving feedback and helping shape the first update to how the federal government collects race and ethnicity data in nearly 30 years. Called Statistical Policy Directive 15, or SPD 15, the Office of Management and Budget’s new survey question for race and ethnicity were announced by President Joe Biden’s executive branch, in March 2024, and were designed to more accurately capture respondents’ racial and ethnic identities. Since the Census Bureau adapts the OMB’s standards for race and ethnicity data, the updated language would have been integrated into the 2030 Census, allowing for a more accurate count of the United States’ diversifying population
But conservative activists swiftly targeted SPD 15, and the Trump administration has slow-rolled the initiative. The failure to adopt SPD 15 ahead of the 2030 Census — potentially coupled with a high-stakes Supreme Court case that threatens to dilute the power of minority voters and a Trump-led redistricting frenzy that may create a slew of new Republican districts across the U.S. — risks significantly further diminishing the political and economic power of non-white voters, experts tell TPM.
“The Trump Administration’s delay in implementing SPD 15 is the latest in its efforts to undermine the accuracy and utility of our nation’s nonpartisan data — and this is troubling,” Marina Jenkins, executive director at the National Redistricting Foundation, a good government group, told TPM in an email. “It is not a coincidence that this delay is happening at a time when Republicans across the country are working overtime to pass gerrymanders that silence millions of voters, particularly voters of color.”
What Is SPD 15 Supposed to Do?
SPD 15 was intended to be an update to the way the agencies across the federal government collect standardized race and ethnicity data,, helping researchers and policymakers better understand the ethnic makeup of communities, to cultivate more effective policy, and to facilitate more targeted resource allocation.
“When the Census 2030 Advisory Committee was still intact and when I was still a member of the committee, there was a lot of support from the Census Bureau for SPD 15,” Dinh told TPM.
But President Donald Trump’s second administration has been decidedly hostile toward such measures of diversity. It has removed demographic information like race and gender from official statistics. It has wiped race and ethnicity data from a public database showing the demographics of federal employees. And it has called on the federal government and government contractors to ignore information on racial equity in hiring, revoking equity-focused executive orders dating back decades.
SPD 15 appears to be another target. Under the directive, federal departments and agencies were initially supposed to have their action plans for policy’s implementation done by last month; they will now have until March 2026, according to the OMB website. All federal race and ethnicity data collections were initially supposed to be “consistent with the updated standards” by March 2029, but that deadline has been pushed to September 2029, well after the 2030 Census process is set to begin.
The U.S. Census Bureau did not return a request for comment on whether SPD 15 would be deployed in time for the 2030 Census. OMB and the White House also did not return TPM requests for comment.
“Our communities have been here for 50 years,” said Dinh of the Southeast Asian community specifically. But even now, she continued, “Wwe see that our communities are now facing intergenerational poverty,” she continued.. “We’re seeing intergenerational inequity in terms of educational attainment.”
SPD 15 was created to address those kinds of issues, allowing for more targeted government policy and for more fine-grained publicly available data used by researchers and community groups.
“The delay of SPD 15 means we don’t have access to realtime data,” Dinh said, “that can really save lives right now.
Inaccurate Race and Ethnicity Date Could Have a Big Impact on Political Representation
The delayed implementation of SPD 15 also coincides with the GOP’s latest efforts to engage in hyper-partisan gerrymandering. And while it’s not entirely clear what implications the directive, or its delay, will have on the way in which districts are drawn post-census, advocates are raising the alarm because of Trump and the GOP’s frequent use of race and ethnicity data to further their political aims, including through racial gerrymandering.
At Trump’s direction, state legislatures are aggressively pursuing new Republican-friendly political maps in red states ahead of the 2026 midterms. At the same time, the Supreme Court appears poised to overturn Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which has historically prevented the dilution of the collective electoral power of racial minorities. That outcome would likely allow Republicans to pick up at least 19 more seats in the U.S. House, according to one analysis. It would also make it more challenging for both the federal government and voting rights groups to challenge alleged racial gerrymanders.
Because of the role race plays in redistricting considerations, delaying the implementation of best-practice race and ethnicity data collection will muddy the information available about majority-minority areas — which also tend to support Democrats — when it next comes time to draw political maps.
“Census data, which includes SPD 15, is a huge determinant in how voting districts are drawn and, beyond just how the districts are drawn, that census data is critical in determining how federal funds are distributed,” said Gaby Goldstein, founder of State Futures, a policy organization focused on state government.
Dinh sees the delayed implementation of SPD 15 as potentially of a piece with “a long term effort to chip away and potentially impact the 2030 Census.”
“It’s certainly possible that the administration is trying to delay the release of detailed data about racial communities that could hinder their redistricting in Republican states,” she told TPM.
A Conservative Assault on the Census
The campaign for updates to federal race and ethnicity survey standards initially began under President Barack Obama’s administration in 2016, but stalled in 2017 after Trump in his first administration delayed consideration of the changes indefinitely. The updates were renewed under Biden, prompted in part by the 2020 Census results, which saw members of many communities start writing in their ethnicities: Cambodian, Laotian, Haitian, Armenian, Israeli.
The “huge uptick” in additional ethnic identification responses wasere “a huge sign that the forms weren’t giving people the ability to identify themselves in the way they view themselves,” Meeta Anand, director for census and data equity at the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights.
By June 2022, OMB announced its intention to revise the federal race and ethnicity data collection protocol. Initial revisions were published the following January and finalized by March 2024. They were the result, according to an OMB webpage about the policy, of 20,000 public comments, 94 listening sessions, three townhalls, a tribal consultation and the contributions of government staff from 35 agencies. The new rule combines race and ethnicity survey questions into one prompt, and encourages respondents to select every option they use to self-identify, writing in additional ethnicity categories if necessary. For example, a Hispanic American could self-identify as Dominican, Guatemalan, or Spanish. It also adds a Middle Eastern or North African racial category.
“With the new standards, what we do anticipate seeing is less people selecting some other race so you are more able to have a clearer understanding of the underlying demographies of districts,” said Anand. “And to have that clearer picture of the congregations and concentrations of race and ethnicities without having that more loose category muddying up the data.”
America’s increasing racial diversity has heavily influenced redistricting across the country. Though there’s been a decrease in majority-Black districts, Latino and Asian-American voters have seen increased representation, according to a 2023 analysis from the now-defunct publication FiveThirtyEight.
“SPD 15 is something we can and should and need to be doing to avoid a situation in which communities may be undercounted and continue to remain historically invisible,” said Goldstein. “The goal of SPD 15 is to change the course of history, where communities have been invisible, for political representation and in terms of resource allocation.”
But Project 2025, the sweeping Heritage Foundation policy initiative that’s guiding many aspects of Trump’s second administration, directly targeted SPD 15 for “review.”
“A new conservative Administration should take control of this process and thoroughly review any changes,” the document’s authors said of the directive revisions. “There are concerns among conservatives that the data under Biden Administration proposals could be skewed to bolster progressive political agendas.”
The Trump team appears to be taking this advice to heart at the same time it is seeking to diminish minority communities’ political and economic power in other ways.
Typically, redistricting is done every 10 years based on the results of the decennial census. But this administration is pushing states to engage in unprecedented mid-cycle redistricting now, while also delaying the implementation of SPD 15. That, in turn, could impact the 2030 census results, which could fail to capture the true diversity of America’s communities, and therefore impact how new maps are drawn in response.
In August, Trump said congressional Republicans “are entitled to five more seats,” in Texas, kicking off a monthslong tit-for-tat that’s seen Democrats organizing around partisan map redrawing to counter new, pro-Republican maps. Red states like Texas, Missouri and Indiana are adapting new GOP-friendly maps, while California, Virginia and other blue states are attempting to alter their own maps in response.
None of this bodes well for fair representation of minority voters, Sara Rohani, assistant counsel at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, noting thatBlack people are historically undercounted in the census.
“Fair political representation, access to government services, and effective enforcement of civil rights laws,” said Rohani, who participated in a case challenging Louisiana’s congressional map for anti-Black racial bias, “all depend on this accurate census count.”
Dinh had also been involved, through her role as executive director of the Southeast Asia Resource Action Center, in giving feedback and helping shape the first update to how the federal government collects race and ethnicity data in nearly 30 years. Called Statistical Policy Directive 15, or SPD 15, the Office of Management and Budget’s new survey question for race and ethnicity were announced by President Joe Biden’s executive branch, in March 2024, and were designed to more accurately capture respondents’ racial and ethnic identities. Since the Census Bureau adapts the OMB’s standards for race and ethnicity data, the updated language would have been integrated into the 2030 Census, allowing for a more accurate count of the United States’ diversifying population
But conservative activists swiftly targeted SPD 15, and the Trump administration has slow-rolled the initiative. The failure to adopt SPD 15 ahead of the 2030 Census — potentially coupled with a high-stakes Supreme Court case that threatens to dilute the power of minority voters and a Trump-led redistricting frenzy that may create a slew of new Republican districts across the U.S. — risks significantly further diminishing the political and economic power of non-white voters, experts tell TPM.
“The Trump Administration’s delay in implementing SPD 15 is the latest in its efforts to undermine the accuracy and utility of our nation’s nonpartisan data — and this is troubling,” Marina Jenkins, executive director at the National Redistricting Foundation, a good government group, told TPM in an email. “It is not a coincidence that this delay is happening at a time when Republicans across the country are working overtime to pass gerrymanders that silence millions of voters, particularly voters of color.”
What Is SPD 15 Supposed to Do?
SPD 15 was intended to be an update to the way the agencies across the federal government collect standardized race and ethnicity data,, helping researchers and policymakers better understand the ethnic makeup of communities, to cultivate more effective policy, and to facilitate more targeted resource allocation.
“When the Census 2030 Advisory Committee was still intact and when I was still a member of the committee, there was a lot of support from the Census Bureau for SPD 15,” Dinh told TPM.
But President Donald Trump’s second administration has been decidedly hostile toward such measures of diversity. It has removed demographic information like race and gender from official statistics. It has wiped race and ethnicity data from a public database showing the demographics of federal employees. And it has called on the federal government and government contractors to ignore information on racial equity in hiring, revoking equity-focused executive orders dating back decades.
SPD 15 appears to be another target. Under the directive, federal departments and agencies were initially supposed to have their action plans for policy’s implementation done by last month; they will now have until March 2026, according to the OMB website. All federal race and ethnicity data collections were initially supposed to be “consistent with the updated standards” by March 2029, but that deadline has been pushed to September 2029, well after the 2030 Census process is set to begin.
The U.S. Census Bureau did not return a request for comment on whether SPD 15 would be deployed in time for the 2030 Census. OMB and the White House also did not return TPM requests for comment.
“Our communities have been here for 50 years,” said Dinh of the Southeast Asian community specifically. But even now, she continued, “Wwe see that our communities are now facing intergenerational poverty,” she continued.. “We’re seeing intergenerational inequity in terms of educational attainment.”
SPD 15 was created to address those kinds of issues, allowing for more targeted government policy and for more fine-grained publicly available data used by researchers and community groups.
“The delay of SPD 15 means we don’t have access to realtime data,” Dinh said, “that can really save lives right now.
Inaccurate Race and Ethnicity Date Could Have a Big Impact on Political Representation
The delayed implementation of SPD 15 also coincides with the GOP’s latest efforts to engage in hyper-partisan gerrymandering. And while it’s not entirely clear what implications the directive, or its delay, will have on the way in which districts are drawn post-census, advocates are raising the alarm because of Trump and the GOP’s frequent use of race and ethnicity data to further their political aims, including through racial gerrymandering.
At Trump’s direction, state legislatures are aggressively pursuing new Republican-friendly political maps in red states ahead of the 2026 midterms. At the same time, the Supreme Court appears poised to overturn Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which has historically prevented the dilution of the collective electoral power of racial minorities. That outcome would likely allow Republicans to pick up at least 19 more seats in the U.S. House, according to one analysis. It would also make it more challenging for both the federal government and voting rights groups to challenge alleged racial gerrymanders.
Because of the role race plays in redistricting considerations, delaying the implementation of best-practice race and ethnicity data collection will muddy the information available about majority-minority areas — which also tend to support Democrats — when it next comes time to draw political maps.
“Census data, which includes SPD 15, is a huge determinant in how voting districts are drawn and, beyond just how the districts are drawn, that census data is critical in determining how federal funds are distributed,” said Gaby Goldstein, founder of State Futures, a policy organization focused on state government.
Dinh sees the delayed implementation of SPD 15 as potentially of a piece with “a long term effort to chip away and potentially impact the 2030 Census.”
“It’s certainly possible that the administration is trying to delay the release of detailed data about racial communities that could hinder their redistricting in Republican states,” she told TPM.
A Conservative Assault on the Census
The campaign for updates to federal race and ethnicity survey standards initially began under President Barack Obama’s administration in 2016, but stalled in 2017 after Trump in his first administration delayed consideration of the changes indefinitely. The updates were renewed under Biden, prompted in part by the 2020 Census results, which saw members of many communities start writing in their ethnicities: Cambodian, Laotian, Haitian, Armenian, Israeli.
The “huge uptick” in additional ethnic identification responses wasere “a huge sign that the forms weren’t giving people the ability to identify themselves in the way they view themselves,” Meeta Anand, director for census and data equity at the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights.
By June 2022, OMB announced its intention to revise the federal race and ethnicity data collection protocol. Initial revisions were published the following January and finalized by March 2024. They were the result, according to an OMB webpage about the policy, of 20,000 public comments, 94 listening sessions, three townhalls, a tribal consultation and the contributions of government staff from 35 agencies. The new rule combines race and ethnicity survey questions into one prompt, and encourages respondents to select every option they use to self-identify, writing in additional ethnicity categories if necessary. For example, a Hispanic American could self-identify as Dominican, Guatemalan, or Spanish. It also adds a Middle Eastern or North African racial category.
“With the new standards, what we do anticipate seeing is less people selecting some other race so you are more able to have a clearer understanding of the underlying demographies of districts,” said Anand. “And to have that clearer picture of the congregations and concentrations of race and ethnicities without having that more loose category muddying up the data.”
America’s increasing racial diversity has heavily influenced redistricting across the country. Though there’s been a decrease in majority-Black districts, Latino and Asian-American voters have seen increased representation, according to a 2023 analysis from the now-defunct publication FiveThirtyEight.
“SPD 15 is something we can and should and need to be doing to avoid a situation in which communities may be undercounted and continue to remain historically invisible,” said Goldstein. “The goal of SPD 15 is to change the course of history, where communities have been invisible, for political representation and in terms of resource allocation.”
But Project 2025, the sweeping Heritage Foundation policy initiative that’s guiding many aspects of Trump’s second administration, directly targeted SPD 15 for “review.”
“A new conservative Administration should take control of this process and thoroughly review any changes,” the document’s authors said of the directive revisions. “There are concerns among conservatives that the data under Biden Administration proposals could be skewed to bolster progressive political agendas.”
The Trump team appears to be taking this advice to heart at the same time it is seeking to diminish minority communities’ political and economic power in other ways.
Typically, redistricting is done every 10 years based on the results of the decennial census. But this administration is pushing states to engage in unprecedented mid-cycle redistricting now, while also delaying the implementation of SPD 15. That, in turn, could impact the 2030 census results, which could fail to capture the true diversity of America’s communities, and therefore impact how new maps are drawn in response.
In August, Trump said congressional Republicans “are entitled to five more seats,” in Texas, kicking off a monthslong tit-for-tat that’s seen Democrats organizing around partisan map redrawing to counter new, pro-Republican maps. Red states like Texas, Missouri and Indiana are adapting new GOP-friendly maps, while California, Virginia and other blue states are attempting to alter their own maps in response.
None of this bodes well for fair representation of minority voters, Sara Rohani, assistant counsel at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, noting thatBlack people are historically undercounted in the census.
“Fair political representation, access to government services, and effective enforcement of civil rights laws,” said Rohani, who participated in a case challenging Louisiana’s congressional map for anti-Black racial bias, “all depend on this accurate census count.”
