Wednesday, August 12, 2026

Trump is trying to derail the census—again

 

Trump is trying to derail the census—again

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2026/8/11/800082877/national/trump-trying-to-derail-census/ 

Trump is trying to derail the census—again

by Lisa Needham
Staff
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Immigration activists rally outside the Supreme Court as the justices hear arguments over the Trump administration's plan to ask about citizenship on the 2020 census, in Washington, April 23, 2019. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite, File)
Immigration activists rally outside of the Supreme Court during arguments over the Trump administration’s plan to ask about citizenship on the 2020 census on April 23, 2019.AP

We are comprehensively screwed by having President Donald Trump run the country into the ground a second time, but one of the worst things about the timing of his presidencies is that he gets to mess with the U.S. Census—twice.

But like most things in Trump’s second term, this is far, far worse than the first time around. 

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick announced Tuesday that he’s going to save us billions by just having the postmen—yes, he says “postmen,” because god forbid any of these scumbags use inclusive language—do the census rather than actual census workers going door to door.

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick walks through a corridor at the Senate as Republicans work to advance President Donald Trump's sweeping domestic policy bill, at the Capitol in Washington, Friday, June 27, 2025. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)
Commerce Secretary Howard LutnickAP

“The job of the Census is simple: go to every house and count every person,” he said. “That is why we are working with the U.S. Post Office to more efficiently and accurately complete the count. Postmen already know where Americans live, and their expertise will save taxpayers billions of dollars.”

Yes, because if there’s one thing this administration is really committed to, it’s being good stewards of our taxpayer dollars, right?

Last year, Trump instructed Lutnick to start working on a new census, one that didn’t actually seem pegged to when we actually have a census—which is supposed to happen in 2030. You will not be surprised to learn that this is also part of his fixation on losing the 2020 election. 

“I have instructed our Department of Commerce to immediately begin work on a new and highly accurate CENSUS based on modern day facts and figures and, importantly, using the results and information gained from the Presidential Election of 2024,” he wrote on Truth Social.

This is, to put it charitably, unhinged.

But it’s also being done for a reason, and it’s the same reason that Trump tried to screw with the census during his first term: He fervently believes that he should not have to count immigrants and that cities—especially blue ones—should have fewer people recorded so the federal government can give them fewer resources. 

As with his first term, Trump is demanding that any undocumented immigrants simply be left out of the census, which also guarantees an undercount of people in cities. How, for example, is the postMAN going to count who lives in a giant apartment building simply by delivering mail?

Undercounting cities, of course, can also decrease the number of House seats in blue states. California has roughly 1.6 million people who are part of populations that are difficult to count and could therefore lose a House seat.

But that’s not all. Population data from the census is used to dole out $1.5 trillion in federal funding, so undercounting means that marginalized communities would have less access to funding for education, healthcare, and more. 

A census taker's briefcase is visible as she knocks on doors, Aug. 11, 2020, in Winter Park, Fla. A report released Tuesday, July 9, 2024, by the American Statistical Association warns that U.S. statistical agencies lack protections against political interference and adequate funding. (AP Photo/John Raoux, File)
A census taker’s briefcase is visible as she knocks on doors on Aug. 11, 2020.AP Photo/John Raoux

The 2020 census is estimated to have undercounted the Latino population by 5%, the Black population by 3%, and Native Americans and Native Alaskans who live on reservations by more than 5%. And guess who was overcounted? Non-Hispanic white people. 

Much like birthright citizenship—where the Supreme Court denied Trump’s executive order, so he simply turned around and issued two new ones—Trump is trying to get around his 2019 loss in Department of Commerce v. New York.

In that case, the court ruled that Trump’s meddling violated the Administrative Procedures Act because the reasons for demanding a citizenship question on that census were pretextual. Trump pretended that he needed the census to have a citizenship question so he could enforce the Voting Rights Act, which was an open and obvious lie.

This time around, Trump’s reasons are no less pretextual: He wants to somehow impose the presidential election count, as if that’s the accurate way of figuring out who lives in the entire nation. But there are plenty of people who don’t vote, who are not registered to vote, or who are too young to vote, and those people are still counted in the census.

It’s also a curious move from an administration that has gone to war against mail-in voting because it’s purportedly easily manipulated, but counting people by mail is fine and dandy.

Trump is definitely doing this to screw with cities, especially because a mail carrier cannot adequately assess who lives in a giant multi-unit apartment.

In this Jan. 20, 2020 photo, Mary Acosta, center, takes part in an Alaska Native dance in Toksook Bay, Alaska, a mostly Yup'ik village on the edge of the Bering Sea. Census workers traditionally begin the official decennial count in rural Alaska when the ground is still frozen. That allows easier access before the spring melt makes many areas inaccessible to travel and residents scatter to subsistence hunting and fishing grounds. The rest of the nation, including more urban areas of Alaska, begin the census in mid-March. (AP Photo/Gregory Bull)
On Jan. 20, 2020, Mary Acosta takes part in an Alaska Native dance in Toksook Bay, Alaska, to mark the beginning of the 2020 Census.AP

But it’s also going to hurt rural communities.

Rural areas are already hard to count, with houses spread out, hidden from main roads, and often without physical addresses. The postal service maintains roughly 21.2 million P.O. boxes and 1.3 million no-fee boxes. The latter are people who can’t receive any form of carrier delivery. 

In Alaska, for example, an estimated 75% of people do not get mail delivered to their homes. And Native Americans who live on reservations often do not have a residential delivery service.

So how, exactly, is a postal worker supposed to count all of those folks?

This mess is going to harm many people for a long, long time—which is exactly in keeping with this administration’s entire ethos. 

This is what happens when you elect a wrecker. He just wrecks it all.

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  1. Comment by stickman009.

    bonus check

  2. Comment by ajpuckett.

    Good thing a Democratic administration and Congress will be running the next Census.

  3. Comment by ProfPupdog.

    ****“I have instructed our Department of Commerce to immediately begin work on a new and highly accurate CENSUS based on modern day facts and figures and, importantly, using the results and information gained from the Presidential Election of 2024"****

    Is that man insane, or just a very foolish idiot?

    I can only imagine what he means by "modern facts and figures" but it's pretty clear what he means about the 2024 election results--where to focus his revenge. Next time he gets loaded into a catering truck, I hope it delivers him to a sanatorium.

    • Reply by Simnsays.

      He is insane and ignorant and just plain MEAN.

  4. Comment by necturus.

    Since the Postal Service doesn't work for the Census Bureau, this would surely require an act of Congress. I am not holding my breath.

  5. Comment by KaliDava.

    Not mentioned is that the Postal Workers are *already* working crazy long hours just to do the job they already have, and barely managing to keep USPS from completely imploding. Rs have wanted to kill the Post Office for a long time, guess tRump sees this a 2 birds 1 stone opportunity.

  6. Comment by 1954gg.

    Just another thing the Dems will have to fix ASAP. When everything is a priority, nothing is a priority. Dems won't be able to do much if/when we win this November. He won't sign any legislation. He will obstruct 24/7 and we won't have a way to override him. I see a mess we can't clean up until we have all 3 branches or...

  7. Comment by Ballerina.

    More simpleton stupidity from those idiots Lutnick and Trump. I was a census taker in 2010, and children in a household are counted in a normal census. Most children don’t receive mail (like bills or circulars), so how is the mail carrier going to know how many children are living in a household? And if the mail carrier is busy interviewing people for the census, how are they going to deliver mail? Delivering mail AND interviewing people for the census will take longer, which is inefficient and won’t save any money. Another stupid scheme from stupid people in the stupid Trump administration.

    • Reply by dogyears.

      In many rural areas the 'postman' /s doesn't actually work for the post office, the carrier is a contractor that delivers the mail, for a price, and rural mail delivery is a pretty awful job. The route I live on went through several contractors before they just decided to have a 'real' postal employee run the route. One contractor just walked off and we had no mail delivery for over a week. Houses may be widely (miles and miles) separated, or there may be lots of side roads and driveways. Mailboxes are clustered at the 'main' road in this case, and the carrier doesn't always know where individual houses even are.

    • Reply by Ozarkblue.

      Yah, for example, here in rural SW MO, when our house was built, we had to put our mailbox in such a cluster, along the 'hard road', a mile from our residence back in the woods. All the other cluster boxes were for folks who are now called MAGAs. After a few months we found that our mail was being stolen. We figure the carrier put one of our ACLU or DNC fliers in a MAGA box, and one of the MAGAs (we had a suspect) decided to stick it to the libs. So we've had a PO Box in the nearest small town for 19 years.

  8. Comment by Things Come Undone.

    Not counting immigrants will not affect elections Immigrants don't vote the few if any cases are not enough to change the election Trump's way.

    Heck we have problems getting legal Hispanics to vote.

    What it will do is reduce federal funding to states that have immigrants and all states have immigrants so all states would lose money.

    • Reply by Things Come Undone.

      At best Trump might be looking for an excuse to have ICE at polling places to harass brown people trying to vote. But of course this will only happen in Blue States.

      If you start harassing brown people voting in Florida the GOP loses the state. Other states with a high number of Cuban immigrants they tend to vote GOP

      "As of 2024, the second state with the highest Cuban American population is Texas,[12] counting a number up to 140,000 individuals identifying as such."

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuban_Americans

      Texas is a big State this might swing a close election

      "Next up, approximately a further hundred thousand Cuban Americans reside in California, making it the third state per highest population in the country with over 70,000 individuals residing in the counties of Southern California, from the Greater Los Angeles area to San Diego.

      Another 20,000 Cuban Americans in the state are concentrated in the San Francisco Bay Area and another 10,000 the counties of Central Valley, California altogether.

      Up next is New Jersey followed by New York (state), hosting approximately 167,000 people altogether, followed by Nevada, with Clark County, Nevada hosting nearly 50,000 Cuban Americans.

      The states of Georgia, Kentucky,[13] and Illinois also host fast-growing communities of Cuban Americans."

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuban_Americans

      ICE will be in California and New York , and Illinois all very Blue states count on ICE being there if anywhere. New Jersey has 14 electoral votes and its purple ICE might show up.

      Nevada is a swing state, Georgia we have a close Senate race, Kentucky who knows what is going on with Mitch ? Trump might decide Kentucky needs help.

      Trump's plan to steal an election might be counter productive a deep dive into Cuban American voting into statewide elections is needed.

      Illegal Immigrants don't vote legal Cubans do and the Supreme Court made stopping likely Immigrants legal.

  9. Comment by Goatwoman.

    "It’s also a curious move from an administration that has gone to war against mail-in voting because it’s purportedly easily manipulated, but counting people by mail is fine and dandy."

    Oh, but there's a difference!

    After all, the people who count ballots are trained to do so.

    Post"men" counting up Americans (in all their spare, overworked and underfunded time, thanks also to Trump) are not trained at all for this.

    Yup! Sounds like a Dementia Don special!

  10. Comment by Things Come Undone.

    I checked two of the links no date is set but surely the Post Office needs money to do a census. When is the next budget decided by Congress? If it's after the fall election then this is just talk.

    Congress has had problems getting a budget decided on time and with Mitch out the Senate will have a problem passing one. ICE funding, Iran war funding, cuts Trump wants to make to Medicare and Medicaid are other reasons for a filibuster

    Will the Senate Dems filibuster?

  11. Comment by Judge Moonbox.

    I've suspected for some time now that Clarence Thomas wants to overturn the Baker v. Carr (1962) decision that instituted the One Person, One Vote rule. These people are worried that gerrymandering won't guarantee them enough votes, so they want to have their areas better represented than the places which vote for Democrats.

    I'm not a constitutional scholar, I can't say for certain that the Founding Fathers wanted an accurate census because they wanted all people represented. (I just realized while writing this that the 3/5ths "Compromise" violated that ideal more than any other practice.) However, it does go hand in hand with the belief that "governments...derive their just powers from the governed" to have equally sized districts to ensure that the governed are equally represented.

    • Reply by Things Come Undone.

      "“In my view, the court has no power to decide these types of claims,” Thomas wrote. “Drawing political districts is a task for politicians, not federal judges. There are no judicially manageable standards for resolving claims about districting, and, regardless, the Constitution commits those issues exclusively to the political branches.”

      If adopted by the Supreme Court, Thomas’s opinion would give free rein to Southern states to reduce Black electoral power wherever it is mathematically feasible. His stance that federal courts have no role in redistricting cases at all would also imperil precedents like Baker v. Carr, the landmark 1962 case that articulated the “one person, one vote” rule. The Warren court dragged America into liberal democracy in the 1960s; Thomas wants to drag the country back out of it."

      https://newrepublic.com/article/181892/clarence-thomas-racial-gerrymandering-south-carolina

      When someone says stuff that crazy a link is needed

    • Reply by Goatwoman.

      Let us all remember that the 3/5ths Compromise was...exactly that.

      A hold-your-nose, under the table giveaway to the southern states at the time, so they wouldn't leave the Union.

      Let us also remember that it worked for all of 70ish years, before the South tried to leave anyway...

  12. Comment by elliott.

    Trump's scheme to reduce absentee ballots delivered by the USPS has been blocked by a federal judge. and he could be out of time for a successful appeal unless the SC short circuits it onto a shadow docket.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C0ERmPv1Wnk

  13. Comment by dave_t638.

    Wow. Not sure if the buffoon actually expects to still be president in 2030, or if he wants to have an early census.

  14. Comment by UKPrince46.

    Further proof trump intents to be around as president in 2030, come hell or high water (and with the trump thumb on climate change it will be hell and high water). I hope the Democrats realize this, cuz he has the US army, the ICE army and the FBI army to back him up... and the Supreme Corrupt Court to kiss his royal fascist ass.

    What's our strategy? Hope he dies before election day 2028? Cuz if he "wins" the election (which indications are he's on planning it) his VP would be "president" if he died then... and the Democrats, always good sports, will just send strong letters of protest and get buffaloed by the RW SCC - Supreme Corrupt Court. Don't think it could happen... like trump's AG couldn't get approved or Rep. "rape" Miller of Ohio can't win in a red district because of a little wife & child abuse... you don't know the republicans!!

  15. Comment by ADReed.

    They won't be in office when the real census -- as defined by the Constitution -- comes around in 2030. Even this corrupt, partisan, MAGA Supreme Court has held to that standard.

  16. Comment by Harvey Manfrenjensenden.

    “The job of the Census is simple: go to every house and count every person,” he said.

    Lutnick missed the memo; the official White House position is that the job of the Census is to count every CITIZEN.

    The Constitution says otherwise, but whatevs.

    • Reply by Judge Moonbox.

      I think Lutnick was just paying lip service to equal representation. We know the Trumpies want to put their obese thumb on the scales. Undercounting minorities and others they don't like is part of that strategy.

    • Reply by dogyears.

      Actually, the major part of the Census is done by mail. Only when that isn't possible, or when the form isn't returned, are census workers sent out to the non-complying addresses. I remember my aunt was one of those workers, and she got a list of addresses that hadn't answered the questions, and that she had to visit and ask them in person.

  17. Comment by annieli.

    Lutnick is such a tool (aside from having crooked sons)

    "Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick announced Tuesday that he’s going to save us billions by just having the postmen—yes, he says “postmen,” because god forbid any of these scumbags use inclusive language—do the census rather than actual census workers going door to door."

    • Reply by sparky81884.

      Postal carriers cost far more than temporary part time census takers we normally hire. While they earn similar hourly wages, postal carriers have health insurance and retirement benefits. And that's without considering that they already have full time jobs so adding more duties would require overtime pay.

      The only way this makes any sense (and it's still not financially sound) is if it goes along with cutting mail delivery to 2-3 days per week but they don't cut staff until after the census. But even that's problematic since mail carriers work days but a lot of census calls need to happen in the evening

    • Reply by Wired Wolf.

      Just another way to destroy the USPS; pile additional ridiculous work on carriers and admin, forcing them to pay overtime and when everything falls over they point and say "See? We told you the postal service is ineffective and expensive so it has to go."

  18. Comment by De veritas.

    They are lunatics. We've had a census every 10 years since 1790 in accordance with the US Constitution. Any off-year travesty would have no legal authority for redistricting. But i can believe they will try.

  19. Comment by BobRR.

    Why can't this m'fucker leave things alone? I can't even spend one fucking afternoon without more shit.

    • Reply by liberalpercy.

      That's the point - flood the zone so you can't keep track of it all.

    • Reply by cassidy3.

      Exactly. These people just keep ripping into every room, every gathering, every page, every pool, every park, poster, wall, body of water, and leaving their stink. Such a waste of time and every other resource. Ridiculous.

  20. Comment by voidstuff.

    There will undoubtedly be lawsuits. I can only hope SCOTUS will still be honest enough to stand up to him like it did in 2019.

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