Steven Dillingham resigned as director of the Census Bureau on Monday, putting an end to a tumultuous term that culminated this month with accusations that he had allowed the policy to override the policy of the country’s top statistics agency.
Dillingham notified the White House that he would leave the agency on Wednesday when the new Biden government takes control of the federal government. Under federal law, his term as director was scheduled to end in December 2021.
Mr. Dillingham, who took over the agency in January 2019 after being appointed to the position by President Trump, introduced himself as an experienced statistician who was committed to defending the historically non-partisan work of the Census Bureau. Previously, he ran two other federal statistical agencies and held a number of other federal positions, from Peace Corps to Office of Personnel Management.
But while his main task was to oversee the 2020 census, even that work was often overshadowed by the Trump administration’s years of effort to use bureau population counts to change House of Representatives redistribution rules and attract political districts in across the country, largely for the benefit of Republicans.
The White House installed four high-level political nominees at the Census Bureau and ordered the bureau last year to produce a state-to-state count of unauthorized immigrants so that they could be deducted from the total population used to reassign seats in the House later this year. .
In an attempt to comply with this urgent order, Dillingham ordered the census count itself to be reduced by one month, losing a flood of lawsuits and raising further questions about the accuracy of a population count already threatened by the pandemic.
The agency acknowledged this month that it would not be able to present the government’s requested immigrant count before Trump stepped down. On Friday, a federal court banned the agency from producing any data related to the order prior to the inauguration of President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.
Defense groups and Democrats in Congress began demanding Dillingham’s resignation last week after the Department of Commerce’s inspector general, who oversees the Census Bureau, revealed that he had opened an inquiry into his management of the agency. Whistleblowers say he and other political appointees pressured career officials to complete a technical report on undocumented migrants before the end of the Trump administration, despite deep concerns over its accuracy.
He tried to challenge the charges, first in a response to the inspector general and again on Monday in a blog post on the Census Bureau website.