The Trump administration has missed a deadline for giving Congress numbers used for dividing up congressional seats among the states, as the U.S. Census Bureau works toward fixing data irregularities found during the numbers-crunching phase of the 2020 census.
President Donald Trump on Sunday missed a deadline for transmitting the apportionment numbers to Congress. Under federal law, the president is required to hand over the numbers to Congress showing the number of people in each state within the first week of the start of Congress in the year following a once-a-decade head count of every U.S. resident. There are no penalties for missing the deadline.
The president's tardiness stemmed from the Commerce Department, which oversees the Census Bureau, missing a year-end target date for giving the apportionment numbers to the president, due to the pandemic and irregularities that were discovered while crunching data from the 2020 census on a shortened schedule.
The census not only decides how many congressional seats each state gets based on population, but it also determines the distribution of $1.5 trillion in federal funding each year.
The earliest date the apportionment numbers will be ready is Feb. 9, as the Census Bureau fixes anomalies discovered during data processing, according to Department of Justice, which is representing the Commerce Department and Census Bureau in a lawsuit filed by a coalition of municipalities and advocacy groups in federal court in San Jose, California.
If that date holds, the Census Bureau will not finish processing the numbers until several weeks after Trump leaves office Jan. 20, putting in jeopardy an unprecedented order by the president to exclude people in the country illegally from those figures. President-elect Joe Biden opposes the order, which was inspired by an influential GOP adviser who wrote that excluding them from the apportionment process would favor Republicans and non-Hispanic whites.
Last week, Biden announced that Rhode Island Gov. Gina Raimondo will be his nominee for Commerce Secretary, which would make her responsible for the final 2020 census numbers instead of current Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, if census data-processing continues past Jan. 20.
Trump’s apportionment order was challenged in more than a half-dozen lawsuits around the U.S., but the Supreme Court ruled last month that any challenge was premature.
The San Jose lawsuit was originally brought by a coalition of municipalities and advocacy groups that had sued the Trump administration in order to stop the census from ending early out of concerns that a shortened head count would cause minority communities to be undercounted. The coalition of municipalities and advocacy groups currently is seeking data and documents to help assess the accuracy of the 2020 census, saying a shortened timeline for processing the data will compromise its quality.
The coalition says Department of Justice attorneys have repeatedly refused to turn over court-ordered documents, and the coalition is seeking sanctions of $5,000 a day until they do so. The Department of Justice says sanctions are inappropriate. A hearing in the lawsuit was being held late Monday.
