Wednesday’s announcement was expected, and the key question remains whether the Census Bureau and the Department of Commerce will present the count to President Donald Trump before his departure on January 20. There are no penalties associated with failure to meet the December 31 deadline.
The Census Bureau said in a statement that it plans to “deliver a complete and accurate count of the state’s population for distribution in early 2021, as close to the legal deadline as possible”.
It is unclear whether the Trump administration has enough data to execute it – or, if so, whether the data is sufficient to really affect how many seats each state receives.
If the figures are produced after Trump leaves office, President-elect Joe Biden is not expected to exclude undocumented immigrants from counting.
Wednesday’s statement said the Census Bureau continues to process data collected from surveys conducted online, on paper, over the phone and in person earlier this year.
Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, who oversees the Census Bureau, pressured authorities to complete the count by December 31 – even after authorities informed him that a truncated schedule would put several states at risk of an incomplete count.
The final schedule gave Census officials about half the time they had planned to complete the complex data processing work.
Internal documents obtained in early December by a House committee investigating how the Trump administration handled the census revealed data problems and “high complexity” problems threaten to delay the completion of the count until February. The director of the Census Bureau did not explain the issues, but said they “occurred in previous censuses”.
Even before data problems arose, the senior career census official who manages the 2020 census said the bureau was aiming for completion “in the first or second week of January”.
In addition to the political controversies, which critics argued made counting more difficult to complete, counting the country’s population was also complicated by the coronavirus pandemic.
The inspector general of the Commerce Department said on Wednesday that the Census Bureau saved with a quality control process and determined that the questions call into question the results for “more than 500,000” families. He said one of the reasons the Census Bureau did not complete quality checks was the shortened schedule.
Although there are no penalties associated with not meeting the deadline, Justice Department attorney Brad Rosenberg pondered at a hearing in September that missing the deadline would be a reason for Congress to reject the numbers.
“It is possible that if the Census Bureau provides its enumeration sometime in January … Congress will still accept that number,” said Rosenberg. “But it’s also possible – and I don’t represent Congress, so I just don’t know the answer to that – that they don’t. If they miss the statutory deadline, it’s not clear whether Congress would still be required to accept any figures presented by the president after the date. ”
This result is not expected.
The delay and the rush to produce the numbers used to divide seats in Congress are expected to have a ripple effect and produce more delays.
After producing the numbers of the offices, the Census Bureau turns its attention to the production of the huge data files used by the state governments to design new electoral districts.
For distribution, only a total number of people in each state is required. But redistricting the data requires more granular details about who these people are and where they live.
The Census Bureau has yet to announce when it expects to complete these files. It usually works to meet the individual deadlines set by the laws of each state.