If the Census Bureau proceeds with its plan to cut short efforts to count every person in the 2020 Census, the census won’t be a true portrait of America. And as a result, every community will have to live for the next decade under the harm of an incomplete count, with millions of people, especially those hit hardest by the pandemic, not counting. 

A large percentage of Americans haven’t yet completed the census. Cutting short the Census Bureau’s efforts to reach all of them will significantly undercount the groups who are less able or less likely to complete the Census online, including people of color, people with disabilities, immigrants, and families with young children. The Trump Administration must not be allowed to exclude these groups and other communities from their constitutionally guaranteed right to participate in the 2020 Census. The Census Bureau must have the time and space it needs for a safe and accurate count. 

Kids Forward is calling on Wisconsin’s Congressional delegation to include language in the next COVID relief package that would extend the statutory reporting deadlines for 4 months and prohibit the Census Bureau and the President from sending census data to Congress in advance of those deadlines.

Forcing the U.S. Census Bureau to rush the census in the middle of a pandemic is part of an intentional plan to sabotage the census to reflect a less diverse and inaccurate portrait of America. A rushed census shortchanges critical operations to count everyone. This would skew Congressional representation, redistricting, and critical funding for every state in the country, including Wisconsin. And when young children are missed in the census, it reduces federal resources for their schools, their child care, their healthcare, and many other programs essential for their well-being. Missing a young child means reducing the resources they need to thrive for an entire decade – most of their childhood.

This effort comes on top Trump’s failed attempt to add a citizenship question to the 2020 Census and his recent memorandum to keep undocumented immigrants from being included in data reported for congressional apportionment. These two actions are similar in that they’re unconstitutional and were put forth knowing they would likely be struck down by the courts. The real goal was to scare and confuse immigrants, people in mixed-status families, and broader immigrant communities – deterring them from participating in the 2020 Census. Unfortunately, that ploy worked because even now that the Supreme Court has spoken, many people don’t know that the citizenship question isn’t on the census.

2020 response rates already lag behind 2010 rates because of COVID-19’s impact, especially for communities that have been undercounted for decades. The Census Bureau is entering the door-to-door counting operation with the lowest response rates in recent memory. That means there are more households that haven’t responded to the census on their own, and a compressed timeline will result in skipping households and short-changing the census operations specifically created to target the communities historically missed by the census.

A successful 2020 Census requires counting hard-to-count communities and effectively following-up with those who didn’t respond on their own. That task is challenging under usual circumstances — but it’s more difficult during a pandemic; and even more difficult still when the President, who has sworn an oath to defend the Constitution, is trying to undermine the efforts to conduct a constitutionally required, accurate census.

An inaccurate census fails the entire country. Rushing key census operations undermines American democracy and the allocation of trillions of dollars of federal spending over the next decade. Every community in Wisconsin and every state in the nation, along with millions of people who have been shortchanged again and again by not being counted in the past, will lose out on funding and fair representation if President Trump forces the Census Bureau to produce an incomplete count of unacceptable quality.