[Politics] How the politics of counting Americans got so twisted

[FazzNoth]

 

 This month the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University posted a US government memo about the 2020 census obtained under a Freedom of Information Act request. Headed “Topics to discuss with Secretary Ross through 12/31”, the memo contains a meeting agenda outlined by Ron Jarmin, deputy head of the Census Bureau.

 

So far, so dull. But dig in and you will find a thought-provoking, if not exactly explosive, message about the future of American democracy. Jarmin penned the missive because he feared his statisticians faced “an unusually high degree of engagement [from politicians] in technical matters, which is unprecedented relative to the previous censuses”. He wanted to define the Census Bureau’s “responsibility as an independent statistical agency”. In plain English, these statisticians feared that Donald Trump’s White House was meddling in their hallowed constitutional procedures — and wanted them to back off.

Should anyone care about this today? Some voters might think not. After all, the census is long over and the work of the number crunchers is so technical that it rarely attracts attention — partly because many civil servants dislike the limelight and prefer to focus on their jobs, not politics. Yet counting people is inevitably political. It shapes how governments organise elections and distribute resources. Hence why America’s founding fathers mandated a once-a-decade count of all residents in the Constitution.

So Jarmin’s plea matters today for at least two reasons. First, while politicians have often tried to influence the presentation of the census in the past, the Trump administration took this interference to a new level by trying to shape how data was defined, collected and processed. They tried, for example, to exclude non-citizens from the census for (almost) the first time. They asked the bureau to use data from other departments to count non-citizens through indirect means. Then, in late 2020, they leaned on the Census Bureau to halt the count early.

Wilbur Ross, who was commerce secretary at the time and oversaw the census, says that these initiatives were simply intended to improve the quality of data. He also points out that many other western countries just count citizens. Yet opponents say the moves were designed to silence the voices of immigrants. Either way, the fight shows how the work of the census is now becoming increasingly political at a time of rising polarisation.

The second reason why Jarmin’s memo is striking is more cheering: it shows how people can fight to uphold the rule of law. During the Trump era, political and legal fights erupted in public about the census citizenship issue, which eventually defeated the initiative.

 

Less well-known was that bureaucrats in the census department were also fighting to protect their processes. This was not because the statisticians backed any political party; they pride themselves on being non-partisan and implementing legal political orders. Thus they complied diligently when the White House asked them to collect data on non-citizens from other agencies.

They are, however, obsessively keen to defend neutral science. “These are people who are sticklers for rules, who don’t want to be political, but to observe good processes,” an official who was at the census bureau explains. So when these processes came under pressure they fought back with, it seems, considerable success.

“FOIA records suggest that the Trump administration attempted to exert extreme partisan influence over the Census Bureau as it was conducting the 2020 Census and that career Bureau officials pushed back at those attempts,” the Brennan Center says.

 

Or as Arturo Vargas, head of the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials Educational Fund, told NPR, what statisticians did to “protect the integrity of census operations [was] nothing short of heroic”. 

Does this mean that the census is now safe from future political pressure? Sadly no. Legal battles are still bubbling and, in a bitterly divided country, the question of people-counting is likely to become more contentious.

But this tale illustrates a theme that the writer Michael Lewis has stressed in two recent books on the pandemic and on the work of government agencies: while US pundits often sneer about the evils of state bureaucracy, these institutions contain some very diligent and honourable people.

The key point is: sometimes quiet battles about bureaucratic process matter as much as noisy posturing in Congress. Particularly when Americans’ faith in their country is crumbling. (A recent survey from Edelman showed that their trust in institutions is now the fourth lowest among the top 27 countries in the world.) So let’s salute those unsung statisticians for their courage in sticking to their job and their arcane processes and hope they continue to do so. Even if we don’t always get to know their names.

https://www.ft.com/content/3ff6dc02-04b6-4c6c-b2da-3e7cfb6f3a23