Simplicissimus

Census Director Santos resigns, making way for Trump’s pick : NPR
▻https://www.npr.org/2025/01/30/nx-s1-5258393/census-bureau-director-robert-santos

[…]
Santos — a nationally recognized statistician who is the first Latino to head the bureau — joined the federal government’s largest statistical agency as a Biden appointee after years of interference at the bureau by the first Trump administration.

Before becoming the agency’s director, Santos was a vocal opponent of how Trump officials handled the 2020 census — including a last-minute decision to end counting early during the COVID-19 pandemic and a failed push to add a question about U.S. citizenship status that was likely to deter many Latino and Asian American residents from participating in the official population tally.

During his three-year tenure, Santos made frequent outreach trips around the country in an attempt to rebuild public trust in the bureau’s leadership.

“It’s important for all Americans to understand that the bureau collects data for their benefit, and I think the outreach he oversaw helped rebuild confidence and interest in the Census Bureau’s work,” says Terri Ann Lowenthal, a census consultant who was once the staff director of the former House oversight subcommittee for the national tally.

Santos helped oversee the creation of a new committee of outside advisers for the 2030 census, as well as planned changes to how the bureau produces statistics on race and ethnicity, a now-dropped, controversial proposal to transform data about people with disabilities and research into how surveys can ask about sexual orientation and gender identity.

Many census watchers are concerned about who Trump names to be the bureau’s next director. The first director appointed by Trump, Steven Dillingham, stepped down in 2021 shortly after whistleblower complaints about an attempt to rush the release of an incomplete data report on non-U.S. citizens. Trump’s first administration also created multiple new positions for political appointees who had no obvious qualifications for serving at the bureau’s top ranks.

“Any attempt to fill the position with someone involved in partisan political activities will undermine public confidence not only in the bureau’s work but the nation’s statistics generally,” Lowenthal says.

Le recensement états-unien, décennal, est un sujet éminemment politique qui a donné lieu à de nombreuses (violentes) controverses au cours de son histoire autour de la question du nombre de représentants des États (apportionment)
Apportionment (politics) - Wikipedia
▻https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apportionment_(politics)

cf. p. ex. une brève synthèse sur la question des « races »
Race and the Census : The « Negro » Controversy | Pew Research Center
(article du 21/01/2010)
▻https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2010/01/21/race-and-the-census-the-negro-controversy

The topic of racial identification on census forms has a long, fascinating history, which has generated fresh debate as the 2010 Census begins. Why, some ask, does the form include the word “Negro,” along with “black” and “African American,” among the options that Americans can choose for their self-identification? Isn’t that term out of date?
As you can see from the review that follows here, racial terms have come in and out of favor from one decade to the next. There was a similar debate about “Negro” in the 2000 Census, as there have been about other race terms in previous census years.

pour le recensement de 2000, il a donné lieu à une longue controverse sur l’utilisation (ou non) d’enquêtes (non exhaustives, donc) estimant le défaut de couverture pour intégrer des corrections de sous-estimations ou sur-estimations. Ça c’est terminé devant la Cour suprême…
▻https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000_United_States_census#Adjustment_controversy

Les discussions d’aujourd’hui évoquées dans l’article se basent sur le 14ème amendement dans lequel figurent les mots :
counting the whole number of persons in each State
que le trumpiste de service triture un peu pour arriver à
we will count each whole person (sous-entendu possédant la nationalité…, donc sans les immigrés illégaux ni, semble-t-il, les détenteurs d’un visa…)
Il s’agit de sa section 2 qui visait à régler le cas des États du Sud où l’abolition de l’esclavage faisait mécaniquement exploser leur population de whole persons gonflant ainsi leur poids à la Chambre des représentants…

(accessoirement – on est toujours dans l’après Guerre de Sécession – la section 3 prévoit l’inéligibilité et l’interdiction d’accès à des fonctions publiques de toute personne hav[ing] engaged in insurrection or rebellion against [Constitution of the United States])
▻https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourteenth_Amendment_to_the_United_States_Constitution

ce délicat sujet technique (!) faisait, évidemment, partie des ordres exécutifs du premier jour…

Trump rescinds Biden’s census order on apportionment : NPR
▻https://www.npr.org/2025/01/20/nx-s1-5268958/trump-order-census-citizenship-question-apportionment

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.”

Biden’s now-revoked 2021 order affirmed the longstanding practice of including the total number of persons residing in each state in those census results. It was issued in response to Trump’s attempt during the national tally in 2020 to exclude millions of U.S. residents without legal status.

That effort began with a failed push to add a citizenship question to census questionnaires, which the U.S. Supreme Court ultimately blocked from the 2020 forms.

Biden’s order also effectively ended a Trump administration-initiated project at the Census Bureau to produce neighborhood block-level citizenship data using government records. That data, a GOP redistricting strategist once concluded, could be “advantageous to Republicans and Non-Hispanic Whites” when voting districts are redrawn.

It’s not clear yet if the second Trump administration would revive these census-related efforts. In his new order, Trump said revoking Biden’s order “will be the first of many steps the United States Federal Government will take to repair our institutions and our economy.”

Conservative groups behind the “Project 2025” plan have included adding a citizenship question among their priorities for a conservative administration. And a growing number of Republican members of Congress, including Rep. Chuck Edwards of North Carolina, have introduced bills that call for using the next head count to tally non-U.S. citizens living in the country and then subtract some or all of those residents from what are known as the congressional apportionment counts.

Late last week, the Republican state attorneys general of Louisiana, Kansas, Ohio and West Virginia filed a lawsuit asking a federal judge to ban the bureau from including in those official numbers residents without legal status and those with visas. The timing of the case resurrects a question that hung over a similar lawsuit by Alabama during the first Trump administration — will Trump officials allow Justice Department attorneys assigned to the lawsuit to fully defend the bureau’s policy of counting all U.S. residents?

Trump’s second term is set to end before final decisions have to be made on what questions the 2030 census will ask and who ends up getting included in the apportionment counts.

Though it had an opportunity during the first Trump administration, the Supreme Court has yet to rule on whether the president can exclude people who are in the country without legal status from the tally that determines political power in the United States.

et on n’est pas beaucoup plus rassuré sur les (autres) sources statistiques fédérales, notamment les enquêtes du BLS
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/1096359