New Census Worry: A Rushed Count Could Mean a Botched One

WASHINGTON — As the 2020 census struggles to find its footing amid the coronavirus outbreak and public reluctance to give the government personal data, officials have a new worry: The Trump administration and Senate Republicans appear to be signaling that they want the census finished well ahead of schedule, pandemic or not.

With almost 40 percent of the nation’s households still uncounted, including the hardest-to-reach populations that are disproportionately poor, people of color and young, the Trump administration took the Census Bureau by surprise last week. It asked the Senate Appropriations Committee to set aside $448 million in the next coronavirus relief package for a “timely” completion of the census.

The request did not define what “timely” meant, and legislation released on Monday said only that the money would be used for nationwide census operations and data processing. But it comes as census workers and former officials say the White House and the Commerce Department, which oversees the Census Bureau, are asking how the bureau can compress its schedule to wrap up the count of households earlier than expected — perhaps by the end of September. The aim, they say, may be to speed up the delivery of key data for political reapportionment to the president by the end of December.

The administration has yet to announce a compressed schedule and may not find a way to do so. But the prospect already has alarmed an array of experts, who warned in recent days that an expedited census risks a deeply flawed count of the nation’s population. The census is constitutionally required to count all residents of the country every 10 years.