Biden White House moves to protect data from politics after Trump

On Jan 19, 2022

The Biden White House this month pushed to protect scientific and statistical agencies like the U.S. Census Bureau from political interference in a report issued just days before newly disclosed documents showed the “unprecedented” extent of the Trump administration’s efforts to gain politically from the 2020 headcount.

A report released last week by a White House task force said the American people have a right to expect from its government “accurate information, data, and evidence and scientifically-informed policies, practices, and communications.”

“This requires scientific integrity — based on rigorous scientific research that is free from politically motivated suppression or distortion,” said the report from the Scientific Integrity Fast-Track Action Committee.

Shortly after the report came out, new documents released over the weekend revealed that political appointees in the Trump administration’s Department of Commerce, which oversees the Census Bureau, tried to exert unusual influence on the 2020 census, the nation’s once-a-decade head count overseen by statisticians, demographers and government bureaucrats. The documents, made public through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit by the Brennan Center for Justice and first reported by The New York Times, showed alarm bells going off within the Census Bureau about efforts by political appointees in the Commerce Department to interfere with the count.

“The department is demonstrating an usually, high degree of engagement in technical matters, which is unprecedented relative to the previous censuses,” said a September 2020 email from Ron Jarmin, who was the Census Bureau’s deputy director, to other top agency officials.

At the time, Census Bureau officials were under pressure to carry out two orders from then-President Donald Trump.

The first Trump directive ordered that people in the country illegally should be excluded from the state population count used for divvying up congressional seats among the states, also known as the apportionment numbers. Even though the U.S. Constitution mandates that every U.S. resident be counted in censuses, Trump said at the time that including people in the country illegally was “part of a broader left-wing effort to erode the rights of Americans citizens, and I will not stand for it.”

The second directive ordered the Census Bureau to gather citizenship information about every U.S. resident using administrative records after the Supreme Court nixed the Trump administration’s effort to add a citizenship question to the census questionnaire. Critics claim the citizenship question was inspired by a Republican redistricting expert, who believed using citizen voting-age population instead of the total population for the purpose of redrawing of congressional and legislative districts could be advantageous to Republicans and non-Hispanic…