Balloons decorate a 2019 event ahead of the 2020 census in Boston. The US House of Representatives has passed a bill that could help protect the 2030 census and other future figures from political interference.
Brian Snyder / Reuters
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Brian Snyder / Reuters
Balloons decorate a 2019 event ahead of the 2020 census in Boston. The US House of Representatives has passed a bill that could help protect the 2030 census and other future figures from political interference.
Brian Snyder / Reuters
After years of census interference by former President Donald Trump’s administration, the US House of Representatives is led by Democrats pass a bill Fifth, that could help protect the 2030 census and other future head of state counts from any additional political interference.
The law includes many protections for the once-decade tally used to redistribute political representation and federal funding to communities around the country.
Under the Fair and Accurate Census Assurance Act, the president would be allowed to remove the director of the Census Bureau solely for “ineffectiveness, neglect of duty, or improper performance of office.” The government accountability room will have to check that all the questions on the census form have been researched and tested.
The bill would also create two additional committees of external advisers to the office – one focusing on statistical quality standards and another on 2030 quantification and the American Community Survey. Period of the office.
But in the final months of this session of the National Assembly, whether lawmakers will be able to implement this legislation to the finish line is an open question.
While the White House has signaled President Biden’s support for the billNo legislator has stepped forward to help protect the law like a companion bill in the Democratic-controlled Senate, where the recently passed House bill is being handled by the Homeland Security Committees and the government of the United States. Senate considers.
However, in a 220-208 vote along party lines, a majority of House Democrats passed the revised version of the bill introduced by Democratic Representative Carolyn Maloney of New York. , the outgoing chairman of the House Oversight and Reform Committee, who has long focused. on census reform.
Maloney, who lost a primaries last month for a redrawn district in New York City, which also helped lead a years-long congressional investigation into Trump officials’ failed to advance a citizenship questionbut Supreme Court blocked after discovering that the administration’s use of the Voting Rights Act to justify a question “appears to have been fabricated.”
The bill would limit the number of political appointees at the Census Bureau
Four former office managers offered to stamp its approval of the bill, which they said in a joint statement in July “will help preserve and protect the independence and integrity of the scientific mission” at the office.
During the Trump administration, many census advocates have voiced alarm about the unusual moves of the former president’s political appointees at the agency.
In the final months to the 2020 census, the number of Trump appointees in office soarswhen four additional officials joined the highest ranks of the agency without a clear qualification.
The Fair and Accurate Census Guarantee Act would limit the number of political appointees in office, including directors, to four and allow only one deputy director, who would have to is a career civil servant selected by the director. Another part of the bill stipulates that operational, statistical and technical decisions for tally can be made only by the chief of staff.
During the House floor debate on the bill on Wednesday, some Republican lawmakers tried to fight many of the bill’s provisions.
Rep. Jody Hice of Georgia, a Republican on the House oversight committee, unsuccessfully proposed an amendment that would remove the requirement for the firing of the department director and the deputy director to be a career civil servant with a background knowledge of the agency’s work as well as demographics, economics, methods investigation, statistics, or data science.
The bill would make Census Bureau employees responsible for “optimizing racial and ethnic equality”
A belated amendment to the passed bill, proposed by Representative Sheila Jackson Lee of Texas, would direct a staff member in the office to “optimize racial and ethnic equality”. ” in the census, which for decades has underestimated people of color while exceeding those who identify as white and not Hispanic or Latino.
The bill would also introduce new reporting requirements for the office.
The agency will have to report to Congress a plan to improve the way it works with local communities to conduct the census, in addition to sharing a five-year cost estimate for all of the agency’s work. and report every two years on its census plans.
The bill would not make the Census Bureau an independent federal agency
The bill passed in the House of Representatives comes days after the non-profit Brennan Justice Center passed it a comprehensive report on policies to improve the census.
That report, citing the NPR report, which recommends taking to the office, is currently being overseen by the Department of Commerce, an independent federal agency.
While Maloney, the bill’s lead sponsor, has introduced previous bills with a similar proposal, she told NPR in July that she took a different approach in her current law for office.
“I know neither the Republican nor the Democratic administrations support it being fully independent, so we have it in the Commerce Department but with strict guidelines, rules, regulations,” Maloney said.
