Each month the Census Counts team compiles Census-related news from a wide swath of national and regional media outlets to keep data equity stakeholders informed and engaged.
As always, you can find earlier clips here.
January 28, 2025 Census Coalition Clips
National
NPR | News Experts warn about the ‘crumbling infrastructure’ of federal government data
The stability of the federal government’s system for producing statistics, which the U.S. relies on to understand its population and economy, is under threat because of budget concerns, officials and data users warn. And that’s before any follow-through on the new Trump administration and Republican lawmakers’ pledges to slash government spending, which could further affect data production. In recent months, budget shortfalls and the restrictions of short-term funding have led to the end of some datasets by the Bureau of Economic Analysis, known for its tracking of the gross domestic product, and to proposals by the Bureau of Labor Statistics to reduce the number of participants surveyed to produce the monthly jobs report.
Hansi Lo Wang | January 24, 2025
Economic Policy Institute | News Rescission of Biden-era EOs on Racial Equity and Racial Justice for AANHPI, Black, Hispanic and Native Americans
On January 20, 2025, President Trump rescinded multiple Biden administration executive orders expressing the federal government’s commitment to racial equity and racial justice. Collectively, the EOs listed below acknowledged the contributions Black, Hispanic, AANHPI and Native Americans have made to this country and proposed ways the government can address systemic barriers to equity, opportunity and justice for these communities. Policy goals included expanding language access to government benefits and services, responding to the rise in racial hate crimes, support for improved data disaggregation, and fulfilling the federal government’s commitment to further Tribal sovereignty.
Economic Policy Institute | January 24, 2025
The Center for Politics | News The Reapportionment of Votes in the Electoral College: The 1970s to Now
Right before the holidays, the U.S. Census Bureau released its latest annual population estimates. Florida and Texas continue to grow rapidly and are poised to once again add House members (and with them, additional electoral votes) following the 2030 census, while some Midwest and Northeast states appear likely to once again lose seats and votes. A more modern wrinkle is that California, which added seats in every reapportionment until 2010, and then lost a seat for the first time ever in 2020, is again slated to lose ground. Kimball Brace of Election Data Services released an assessment of what the new estimates might mean for the 2030 census, which of course is still half a decade away.
Kenneth Martis | January 23, 2025
AP News | News Republicans renew efforts to limit people in US illegally from census count | AP News
Republican efforts to exclude people in the U.S. illegally from numbers used to divvy up congressional seats among states have begun anew, with four Republican state attorneys general suing to alter the once-a-decade head count even before President Donald Trump’s second term in office began Monday.
Trump joined in the battle immediately upon returning to office, signing an executive order on Monday that rescinded a Biden administration order and signaled the possibility of a push by his new administration to change the 2030 census. Those efforts may get a boost from the GOP-controlled Congress, where Republican U.S. Rep. Chuck Edwards from North Carolina earlier this month re-introduced legislation that would put a citizenship question on the census form.
Mike Schneider | January 22, 2025
NPR | News Trump rescinds Biden’s census order, clearing a path for reshaping election maps
Among the dozens of Biden-era executive orders that President Trump revoked on Monday was one that had reversed the first Trump administration’s unprecedented policy of altering a key set of census results. Since the first U.S. census in 1790, no resident has ever been omitted from those numbers because of immigration status. And after the Civil War, the 14th Amendment has called for the population counts that determine each state’s share of U.S. House seats and Electoral College votes to include the “whole number of persons in each state.”
Hansi Lo Wang | January 21, 2025
States
California
The San Diego Union-Tribune | News San Diego County is preparing for its annual homelessness census with federal aid at stake
With federal funding on the line and a president in office who wants to upend longstanding homelessness policies, more than a 1,000 people around San Diego County are again preparing to tally how many fellow residents do not have permanent housing. The annual point-in-time count begins early Thursday and serves as one of the most prominent ways for quantifying what is perhaps the region’s most visible crisis. Officials are still looking for an additional 100 volunteers to conduct the one-day census.
Blake Nelson | January 27, 2025
North Carolina
The Carolina Journal | News NC representatives push to block noncitizens from Census count
A bill backed by four North Carolina representatives has once again been introduced in the US House of Representatives to prevent noncitizens from being included in the population count that determines the nationwide apportionment of House seats and Electoral College votes. Republican Congressman Chuck Edwards, NC-11, sponsored the bill earlier this month to prevent illegal immigrants from influencing each state’s congressional representation apportionment. North Carolina Representatives Mark Harris, NC-08, Brad Knott, NC-13, and David Rouzer, NC-07, have signed on as co-sponsors, along with 48 other Republicans in Congress. The legislation, which passed the House last May but did not make progress in the Democrat-controlled Senate, would add a question to the census about citizenship status so that only citizens who complete the census are counted for election representation purposes.
Brianna Kraemer | January 24, 2025
Ohio
Mahoning Matters | News Ohio AG joins three other states in lawsuit to keep certain immigrants out of census counts
Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost has joined Ohio with three other states in a federal lawsuit seeking to keep certain immigrants from being counted in the U.S. Census including those in the country illegally and those with temporary visas. The case was filed in U.S. District Court on Jan. 17 and also includes the attorneys general from Louisiana, West Virginia and Kansas. Yost and the other state legal chiefs – filing the action against the U.S. Department of Commerce and the U.S. Census Bureau (an agency within the Commerce department) – say a residence rule that allows foreign nationals living in the U.S. to be counted in the decennial census resulted in 2020 Census figures that “included illegal aliens and aliens holding temporary visas” to determine apportionment for U.S. House districts and Electoral College representatives.
Susan Tebben/Ohio Capital Journal | January 23, 2025
Blog Posts and Reports
Scientific Data | Journal Article A National Synthetic Populations Dataset for the United States
Geospatially explicit and statistically accurate person and household data allow researchers to study community-and neighborhood-level effects and design and test hypotheses that would otherwise not be possible without the generation of synthetic data. In this article, we demonstrate the workflow for generating spatially explicit household- and individual-level synthetic populations for the United States representing the year 2019. We use publicly available U.S. Census American Community Survey (ACS) 5-year estimates from the 2015–2019 ACS.
James Rineer, Nicholas Kruskamp, Caroline Kery, Kasey Jones, Rainer Hilscher & Georgiy Bobashev | January 25, 2025
U.S. Census Bureau | Press Release Census Bureau Releases 2022 Nonemployer Statistics Marine Economy Table
The U.S. Census Bureau today released the 2022 Nonemployer Statistics (NES) estimates of the U.S. Marine Economy. Nonemployer Statistics is a data product that provides subnational economic data for businesses that have no paid employees, are subject to federal income tax, and have receipts of $1,000 or more ($1 or more for the Construction sector). Nonemployer establishment counts and receipts estimates are provided by nonstandard state- and county-equivalent geographies, comprised of selected coastal regions across each state, and by the Economics: National Ocean Watch (ENOW) sectors defined by the Office for Coastal Management at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). The ENOW sectors include Tourism and Recreation, Ship and Boat building, Marine Construction and Transportation, Offshore Minerals, and Living Resources such as fishing.
Mitchell A. Friedmann | January 21, 2025
