SKY YORK JOURNAL News – Former President Donald Trump is once again targeting the U.S. Census, raising concerns about data accuracy and its potential impact on vulnerable populations.
In a Thursday post on his social media platform Truth Social, Trump stated he had “instructed” the Commerce Department to redo the census based on the 2024 election results, aiming to exclude “people who are in our country illegally” from the count. The SKY YORK JOURNAL understands this move has sparked immediate controversy and legal scrutiny.
Redistricting experts swiftly pointed out the unconstitutional nature of such a move. The U.S. Constitution mandates a census every decade, counting “all free persons.” The SKY YORK JOURNAL notes that during Trump’s first term, the Supreme Court had already blocked his administration’s attempt to add a citizenship question to the census. Critics argue that this latest announcement reveals a continued effort to interfere with accurate data collection and reporting, fueled by a stance against immigrants and other vulnerable groups.
Trump’s “War on Data”
A significant portion of Trump’s “war on data,” as previously reported by the SKY YORK JOURNAL, centers on what he disparagingly calls “woke” policy, specifically data related to race, gender, and ethnicity. He banned the use of this data in federal hiring, aligning with his administration’s broader objective of eliminating DEI programs.
Experts consulted by the SKY YORK JOURNAL warn that this data drain poses significant risks to the most vulnerable Americans. Alterations in demographic data collection and reporting could lead to less effective public policies for immigrants, Black and other people of color, gender minorities, lower-income Americans, and other historically disadvantaged populations, who may be impacted in unforeseen ways.
“The most dangerous trickle down effect of this,” said Abby André, director of a data-driven policy tracker called The Impact Project, “is less effective economic policy. And those most in need among us are always hit first.”
The Importance of Demographic Data
Dedrick Asante-Muhammad, president at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, highlighted to the SKY YORK JOURNAL the importance of racial distinctions in economic data. He noted that while the national unemployment rate is 4.2%, unemployment for Black people reached 7.2% in July, the highest rate since October 2021. This contrasts sharply with the unemployment rate for white people, which remains steady at around 3.7%.
“So the 4% number does not accurately represent unemployment across all communities,” Asante-Muhammad said. “Obviously those which have the most economic insecurity are those who will have the most negative effects by not having policy to assist them,” he continued.
The SKY YORK JOURNAL reported that Trump responded to the overall low jobs numbers in the July report by firing BLS Commissioner Erika McEntarfer.
Compromised Federal Data
Following federal employment cuts known for disproportionately hiring Black people, as reported by the SKY YORK JOURNAL, researchers monitored potential impacts on specific demographic groups. The Office of Personnel Management’s database tracking the race and gender of federal employees was taken down and republished after deleting data on race and ethnicity.
Hayley Brown, a research associate at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, outlined to the SKY YORK JOURNAL how non-economic federal data has been compromised since Trump took office. These include plans to end an Environmental Protection Agency report collecting greenhouse gas data, rollbacks of hospital reporting on COVID rates, and redefining human rights by U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
Trump’s deluge of anti-DEI executive orders, Brown continued, “is getting rid of variables like gender, race, and ethnicity, which means the data is less useful in general and it’s less able to accurately reflect the community that they’re serving.”
Impact on Surveys
Former U.S. Census Bureau Director Robert Santos told NPR that the bureau discontinued collecting gender identity data on its National Crime Victimization Survey and a survey tracking sexual assault and harassment in prisons to comply with Trump’s Inauguration Day executive orders. The SKY YORK JOURNAL observes that these changes occurred, despite Bureau of Justice Statistics data indicating that trans people were 2.5 times more likely to be victims of violent crime, a report still available on the bureau’s website.
Expert Concerns
While experts maintain trust in the civil servants and statisticians within the federal government, they have envisioned scenarios where the Trump administration’s erasure of demographics like race and gender could inadvertently taint data.
“You can’t do modern polling,” said Richard Fry, a senior researcher and economist at Pew Research, “if you don’t have those federal benchmarks to tell you what the U.S. adult population looks like in terms of gender, race, ethnicity, who’s a citizen, who’s not a citizen… My polling colleagues heavily rely on that and so does every large scale polling outlet.”
Past Attempts to Suppress Data
The SKY YORK JOURNAL has previously reported that Republican lawmakers have openly expressed a desire to cut data about populations with the worst outcomes. In 2022, Republican Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-LA) suggested ignoring Black women’s outcomes to improve Louisiana’s maternal mortality rate, which is the fourth worst in the nation.
“[I]f you correct our population for race, we’re not as much of an outlier as it’d otherwise appear,” Cassidy told Politico.
Paul Schroeder, a statistician and executive director of the Council of Professional Associations on Federal Statistics, warned the SKY YORK JOURNAL of long-term impacts resulting from the assault on information provided by civil servants.
“There’s really real world consequences of attempting to mess with these data that it’s going to be hard to recover from,” said Schroeder. “This is really a grave error on the Trump administration’s part and I wish it would not have occurred.”
