Facing criticism of efforts to produce citizenship data to comply with an order from President Donald Trump, the United States Census Director Steven Dillingham said on Monday that he planned to resign with the change in presidential administration.
Dillingham said in a statement that he would step down on Wednesday, the day Trump leaves the White House and President-elect Joseph Biden takes office.
The Census Bureau director’s plan to resign comes as the statistical agency is analyzing the 2020 census numbers, which will be used to determine how many seats in Congress and votes at the Electoral College each state gets, as well as the distribution of $ 1.5 trillion in federal spending each year.
Last week, Democratic lawmakers asked Dillingham to step down after a law enforcement agency said it set a deadline that pressured statisticians to produce a report on the number of people illegally in the United States.