- A Sept. 9, 2026 federal filing would drop the census's race and ethnicity question entirely and, in a separate change, stop counting immigrants who lack a green card toward the population totals used to divide up congressional seats.
- The same filing would also bar the census from ever asking about sexual orientation and would rewrite how officials decide where someone "lives," leaning on tax records such as W-2s instead of the address-based approach used today.
- None of this is settled policy. Federal law requires a recommended 2030 question list to reach Congress by April 1, 2027, and lawmakers — not the executive branch — hold constitutional authority over how the count is designed.
- The Census Bureau's own review found it missed nearly 5% of the Latino population in 2020, and advocates warn a high-profile proposal like this one can discourage participation even if it never takes effect.
What the filing actually proposes
Officials posted the plan to the Federal Register on Wednesday, opening a public comment period before any part of it can become official policy for 2030, according to reporting from NPR's Hansi Lo Wang. Two changes sit at the center of it. First, the apportionment count that decides how many U.S. House seats and Electoral College votes each state receives would, for the first time, leave out anyone who is neither a citizen nor a green-card holder as of Census Day 2030 — a break from the standard the Bureau has followed since 1790, when the Constitution's mandate to count the "whole number of persons in each state" was applied without regard to immigration status. Second, the census would stop asking about race and ethnicity altogether, ending a question format the national head count has carried in some version since its very first year.
Two additional pieces of the Federal Register filing have drawn less attention so far. The plan would prohibit the census from ever including a question on sexual orientation — a topic the form has approached only indirectly, by asking cohabiting couples to describe each other as "opposite-sex" or "same-sex" partners. And it would redefine "usual residence," the concept that decides which address counts a person toward which state, using documentation such as tax returns and W-2 forms rather than the address-based standard used now — a shift that could pull the count's weight toward wherever a person's tax paperwork points rather than where they actually spend their time.
Nothing is finalized — here's the actual timeline
By statute, officials owe Congress a recommended list of 2030 census topics no later than April 1, 2027 — three years ahead of Census Day — and it's lawmakers, not the president, who hold constitutional authority over how the count is designed. A change in administration also sits on the calendar: whoever takes office in January 2029 could rewrite or scrap the plan well before that 2027 deadline arrives, let alone before the census itself takes place.
This isn't the administration's first attempt to reshape the count. During Trump's first term, an effort to add a citizenship question was struck down by the Supreme Court in 2019, with Chief Justice John Roberts writing that the administration's stated rationale for the question appeared contrived. A separate push to strip people without legal status out of the 2020 apportionment numbers also collapsed before it could be carried out. This round traces back to an August 2025 social media post in which Trump instructed officials to launch a fresh nationwide count in the midst of a congressional redistricting fight he himself had triggered — despite the Constitution giving the presidency no final word over how the census runs.
The seat math: what's known, and what isn't
No state-by-state projection exists yet for the population this proposal actually targets, and that gap is worth stating plainly rather than filling with a guess. The closest available data point comes from a Pew Research Center analysis, which modeled a narrower and older question: what would happen if only immigrants without legal status — not the broader green-card-based category named in this week's filing — were excluded, using 2019 population estimates. Under that scenario, California would have lost a second congressional seat beyond what population trends alone would cost it, while Texas and Florida would each have gained one fewer seat than otherwise projected. Because Pew's model leaves out lawful visa holders, Temporary Protected Status recipients and other legally present noncitizens who would fall under the new proposal's broader category, it likely understates the effect in states such as New York and Illinois that host larger populations of visa holders.
What civil rights groups say would be lost
Groups that rely on census race data to enforce the Voting Rights Act, including the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, say that evidence base disappears along with the question. The organization has for decades used census-derived population figures to identify where new Latino-majority districts are legally required and to challenge maps that dilute Latino voting strength; without a race question, that data goes away.
A parallel fight is already playing out in court over the apportionment side of the proposal. Missouri's attorney general sued to force a redo of the 2020 apportionment numbers without counting people who lack legal status, and to lock in the same standard for 2030; a parallel case brought by four additional Republican attorneys general is now before a federal court in Louisiana. Immigrant-rights organizations, including OCA-Asian Pacific American Advocates and Make the Road New York, represented by ACLU affiliates, have moved to intervene in the Missouri case, arguing in a court filing that the request "would distort representation for millions of Americans" if it succeeds.
Why the undercount risk is already real
The Census Bureau's own post-enumeration survey found the 2020 count missed 4.99% of the Latino population, more than triple the 1.54% miss rate recorded in 2010 — a jump large enough that Arturo Vargas, longtime CEO of the NALEO Educational Fund, said at the time that he had "never seen such a large undercount in the Hispanic population" in more than three decades of following the census.
Voto Latino estimates that roughly a third of Latino households now carry a heightened risk of being missed, largely out of fear that census answers could somehow reach immigration enforcement — a concern federal law is specifically built to prevent, since the Bureau is barred from sharing individual responses with agencies like ICE. Whether or not this proposal survives Congress, a widely covered plan like it tends to amplify that same fear in the metro areas where undercounts already run highest: greater New York, Los Angeles, Houston, Chicago and Miami.
The longer fight behind this week's filing
The dispute over how the census treats race data didn't start this week. The Heritage Foundation's Project 2025 agenda had already urged a future conservative administration to revisit the Biden-era changes, arguing that the new standards "could be skewed to bolster progressive political agendas," according to the document as quoted by NPR — the same argument resurfacing almost verbatim in Wednesday's filing. Those Biden-era changes, finalized in 2024, added "Hispanic or Latino" and "Middle Eastern or North African" as distinct checkboxes — the first substantive rewrite of the government's race and ethnicity standards since the late 1990s.
