42 MOTHER JONES |^ MAY JUNE 2018
HIDDEN FIGURESresignation. The bureau canceled field tests last year in
Puerto Rico and on Native American reservations in North
Dakota, South Dakota, and Washington state that were de-
signed to help the census reach hard-to-count communities.
It then eliminated two of three “dress rehearsals” planned
for April 2018, leaving Providence, Rhode Island, as the only
site to test the bureau’s new technology before the 2020
census begins. (Rhode Island’s secretary of state says she’s
received almost no communication from the bureau about
the test.) Prewitt, the census director in 2000, compared the
situation to the Air Force putting a new fighter plane into
battle without testing it first. “You would never do that to
the military,” he said, “but they’re doing that to the census.”
The Census Bureau has half as many regional centers and
field oices today as it did in 2010. The Denver oice over-
sees a region that stretches from Canada to Mexico. With
the Boston oice closed, the New York oice covers all of
New England. There are only two census outreach workers
for all of the New York City metro area, according to JeffWice, a census expert at the Nelson A. Rockefeller Institute of
Govern ment in New York. The first digital census may make
the process more convenient for some people, but 36 per-
cent of African Americans and 30 percent of Hispanics have
neither a computer nor broadband internet at home, and a
Pew Research Center survey published last year found that
more than a third of Americans making less than $30,000 a
year lack smartphones. In California’s Central Valley, “people
aren’t just sitting around in a beaten-down trailer or an
old motel on their laptop waiting to fill out their census
form,” says Ilene Jacobs, director of litigation, advocacy, and
training for California Rural Legal Assistance. (The Census
Bureau will partially mitigate this issue by mailing paper
questionnaires to the 20 percent of American households
that have poor internet access.)
Quezada and Sanjuan identified more than 600 uncon-
ventional structures in Fresno that could be sent census
notices in 2020, increasing the number of housing units
in the Census Bureau’s database by 6.3 percent in the
areas they canvassed. But there will be fewer people dis-
patched by the bureau to count their occupants in person
if they fail to respond, with the number of enumerators
nationally dropping from more than 500,000 in 2010 to
about 300,000 in 2020.
The technological shortcomings of the census are be-
coming apparent. Last year, the Government AccountabilityOice labeled it a “high risk” program and warned that the
census website’s scheduled launch in April 2020 could resem-
ble the disastrous HealthCare.gov rollout in 2010. The gao
found that only 4 of the bureau’s 40 technology systems had
cleared testing, and none were ready to be used in the field.
Cybersecurity is also a major concern. Thompson says
the bureau receives a “large number of attacks” every day.
An internal review in January listed cybersecurity and
public skepticism of the bureau’s ability to handle confi-
dential data as the top two “major concerns that could affect
the design or the successful implementation of the 2020
census.” The gao has warned that “cyber criminals may at-
tempt to steal personal information collected during and
for the 2020 Decennial Census.” Hackers, including from
Russia, could even seek to manipulate the overall count by
breaking into the bureau’s databases.strong leadership could remedy some of these defi-
ciencies, but there’s essentially no one steering the ship.
Thompson announced his resignation on May 9, 2017, the
same day fbi Director James Comey was fired. Thomp-
son’s deputy, Nancy Potok, had already left to become the
country’s chief statistician. The administration still hasn’t
nominated anyone to replace them.
In November, Politico reported that Thomas Brunell, a
professor of political science at the University of Texas-
Dallas, would become the bureau’s deputy director, the
position in charge of running the decennial census. Unlike
past deputy directors, who were nonpartisan career civil
servants with extensive census experience, Brunell had
never worked in government. He had, however, written
a 2008 book called Redistricting and Representation: Why
Competitive Elections Are Bad for America, which provoca-
tively argued that segregating voters by party ailiation in
ultrasafe electoral districts offered them better represen-
tation than spreading them across competitive ones. He’d
also been hired by Republicans in more than a dozen states
as an expert witness in redistricting cases, defending some
gop-drawn maps that were later struck down by federal
courts for racial gerrymandering.
The reports about Brunell sparked furious pushback
from civil rights advocates. “It’s breathtaking to think
they’re going to make that person responsible for the
census,” former Attorney General Eric Holder told me.
“It’s a sign of what the Trump administration intends to
do with the census, which is not to take a constitutional
responsibility with the degree of seriousness that they
should. It would raise great fears that you would have a
very partisan census.”
In February, Brunell withdrew from consideration. Yet
the bureau has already become politicized. Last year, Trump
installed Kevin Quinley, the former research director at
Kellyanne Conway’s Republican polling firm, whose clients
included Breitbart News, as a special adviser to the bureau.
Quinley reports to the Oice of White House Liaison at
the Commerce Department, which reports to the White
House, according to a former department oicial. “If some-Of all the ways democracy is threatened
under President Donald Trump, an
unfair census could have the most
dramatic long-term impact.