Trump rescinds Biden's Census order on apportionment: NPR

Demonstrators opposed to Trump's first administration's push for a census citizenship question gathered outside the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, D.C., in 2019.

J. Scott Applewhite/AP

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J. Scott Applewhite/AP

President Trump on Monday rescinded dozens of Biden-era executive orders, including one that reversed an unprecedented first-term Trump administration policy that altered a key set of census results.

Since the first U.S. census in 1790, no resident has been excluded from the count because of immigration status. After the Civil War, the Fourteenth Amendment required population statistics to determine each state's share of U.S. House seats and electoral votes arrive Includes “total head count per state.”

Biden's now-rescinded 2021 order affirmed the longstanding practice of including the total number of people living in each state in census results. It was released in response to Trump's attempt to exclude millions of U.S. residents without legal status during the 2020 national count.

The effort began after a failed effort to add a citizenship question to the census questionnaire, with the U.S. Supreme Court ultimately blocking the question from appearing on the 2020 form.

Biden's order also effectively ends a project launched by the Trump administration at the Census Bureau to use government records to generate neighborhood-level citizen data. One Republican redistricting strategist once concluded that the data could “favor Republicans and non-Hispanic whites” when it comes to redistricting.

It's unclear whether a second Trump administration will resume these census-related efforts. In the new order, Trump said rescinding Biden's order “will be the first of many steps the U.S. federal government will take to repair our institutions and our economy.”

The conservative group behind Project 2025 has made citizenship a priority for the conservative government. A growing number of Republican members of Congress, including North Carolina Rep. Chuck Edwards, have introduced bills that would use the next census to count non-U.S. citizens living in the country and then subtract some or All residents. So-called congressional apportionments matter.

Trump's second term is coming to an end before final decisions must be made on which questions will be asked in the 2030 census and who will ultimately be included in the apportionment count.

Despite an opportunity during Trump's first administration, the Supreme Court has yet to rule on whether the president can exclude people without legal status in the United States from statistics that determine political power in the United States.

Editor Benjamin Swasey