It should come as no surprise that a president whose first term began with a dispute over the size of the crowd at his inauguration would begin his second term with a war over numbers. Yet, over the last few months, the Trump administration has unleashed a wave of attacks on official statistics whose scope is far wider than those of his first term. Data can’t defend itself, but fights from Trump’s first administration offer a road map for resistance.
Since the day of Donald Trump’s inauguration, his administration has undertaken multiple actions undermining the integrity of census figures. First, the president issued an executive order revoking a Biden-era order affirming the long-standing precedent of counting noncitizens in the census. The new administration began taking down data from the bureau’s website. Earlier this month, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick disbanded several outside advisory committees that provide technical expertise to the bureau. And the administration enacted hiring freezes that will halt census operations.
The census isn’t the only data in the administration’s sights. Lutnick also suggested that the government may separate government spending from calculations of the gross domestic product (GDP). That change, also supported by billionaire Elon Musk, would conceal the negative economic effects of the administration’s gutting of federal agencies and programs.
Official statistics are the backbone of American democracy and a strong economy.
The administration’s slash-and-burn approach is also threatening data confidentiality protections. Within the past week, federal judges in two separate cases have temporarily blocked Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency from accessing people’s private data at multiple government agencies, including the Treasury Department and the Social Security Administration.Official statistics are the backbone of American democracy and a strong economy. Census counts affect not only how political representation is allocated in Congress, the Electoral College and state legislatures, but they also determine how trillions in federal aid flow to communities across the country. GDP calculations affect decisions made by investors, businesses and policymakers.
As for keeping the confidentiality of data, such protections are a bedrock commitment of both the Social Security Administration and the Internal Revenue Service. In addition to protecting Americans’ sensitive data, confidentiality is also essential for maintaining the quality and integrity of federal data. Research by the Census Bureau has found that confidentiality concerns — as well as low levels of trust in the federal government more generally — remain a major barrier to participation in the U.S. census, and thus to the accuracy of the data we use to allocate political representation and trillions in federal dollars.
Manipulating federal statistics is more than an attack on democratic governance. It could have significant economic ramifications—including misallocations of capital, investment bubbles or economic stagnation. Efforts to manipulate economic statistics could also have severe consequences for the U.S. credit rating, which affects the country’s borrowing costs, investor confidence and global financial stability.This attempted conquest of data is not an inevitability, however. The federal statistical system — while managed by executive branch agencies — belongs not to any single president or political party but to all of us. Stopping the assault on official statistics, as I document in my forthcoming book on the 2020 census, will require collective action beyond the Beltway.
Americans have a right — embedded in numerous sources of law and custom — to accurate official statistics free of manipulation. The Constitution charges Congress with the responsibility of carrying out an “actual enumeration” of the entire U.S. population (not just citizens). And, over the last half-century, Congress has passed laws that protect the confidentiality of responses to the census and other federal surveys.
It took acts of resistance by civil servants to protect the 2020 census from political manipulation.
Congress has also passed numerous pieces of legislation to insulate these decisions from political interference. The Information Quality Act of 2000, for example, not only requires federal agencies to ensure and maximize the quality, objectivity, utility and integrity of statistical data, but also provides opportunities for public stakeholders to challenge flawed data. Lawmakers have given experts in the executive branch discretion in determining methods for collecting official statistics, but these laws are complemented by internal policy directives that require agencies to follow professional standards — rather than political prerogatives — when analyzing and presenting official statistics.These protections are not self-executing, of course. As I document in the book, it took acts of resistance by civil servants to protect the 2020 census from political manipulation, such as adding a citizenship question. Such manipulation would have reduced census participation in numerous states and cities. But, as one Republican redistricting strategist put it, the moves could engineer advantages in Congress for “Republicans and non-Hispanic Whites.” Even simple acts from civil servants, such as keeping careful records and making clear arguments about the costs and consequences of adding a citizenship question to the questionnaire, had profound impacts on the Trump administration’s ability to enact its agenda.
At the same time, state and local governments and advocacy organizations also won important legal victories. These wins blocked the inclusion of a citizenship item on the 2020 questionnaire and significantly slowed the administration’s subsequent effort to remove undocumented people from census counts that determine the allocation of seats in Congress. Outside courtrooms, states, cities and nonprofits ran ‘get out the count’ campaigns targeting undercounted communities. In a climate of disinformation and the chaos of the Covid pandemic, these networks of officials and community partners were vital to boosting census participation and safeguarding its integrity.
Given the time-sensitive nature of census operations, exposing fabricated administrative records to daylight and winding down the clock through these lawsuits proved to be just as important as actually prevailing in court. The legal battles over the census offer important lessons for investors and state and local governments who might be harmed by today’s efforts to manipulate GDP calculations.
To be sure, merely repeating the same strategies that worked to defend the 2020 census may not be enough this time. The current attack on official statistics arguably extends wider, goes deeper and relies on a far more coherent plan, in the form of the voluminous Project 2025. That playbook contemplates not merely restarting the assault on the census begun in the 2020 cycle, but also consolidating political control over the production of official statistics by merging all statistical agencies into a single bureau.Already the Trump team has shown far more resolve at hollowing out expertise at administrative agencies, clearing a path for statistical sabotage. And the administration can look to a Supreme Court which has shown an almost unparalleled deference to executive aggrandizement.
Nevertheless, the battle over the 2020 census offers several valuable lessons for the present moment. Most importantly, it suggests that official statistics — however vital they are to the American economy, democracy and the rule of law — will not save themselves. What counts, in the end, is our collective capacity to protect them.
