Judge says 2020 census must continue for another month
Source: Politico
The 2020 census count must continue, a federal judge ruled late Thursday, rebuking the Census Bureau for a last-minute about-face that sought to wrap up the decennial count on a compressed timeline after initially asking for an extension.
An appeal from the government is expected. Enumeration, the process of actually counting each American, was set to end at the end of the month before the court order.
Experts both inside and outside the beleaguered agency raised serious concerns about the once-in-a-decade count, which was thrown into disarray by the spread of Covid-19. As early as mid-April, just weeks into the country shuttering during the pandemic, the Census Bureau pleaded with Congress to extend deadlines for the count for 120 days.
The proposed deadlines would have pushed field collection until the end of October, with apportionment data — the population count used for determining the number and population of each state's congressional districts — being submitted to the president by April 30, 2021 instead of by years’ end. But Congress never officially granted the statutory extensions, and in late July, Census Bureau Director Steven Dillingham, an appointee of President Donald Trump, began to back away from the bureau’s requested extension. In early August, the bureau officially announced that it was reversing its request for an extension and would deliver apportionment data to Trump by the end of the year.
Read more: https://www.politico.com/news/2020/09/25/judge-2020-census-end-date-421630
= new reply since forum marked as read
