Trump administration proposes major changes to 2030 census

The Trump administration is proposing sweeping changes to the 2030 census, including a possible citizenship question and the exclusion of many noncitizens from population totals used to divide seats in Congress and votes in the Electoral College.

A version of the federal rule published in the Federal Register would narrow who the Census Bureau classifies as a U.S. resident and change how the government defines where people live. Talking Points Memo reported that the final version is more aggressive than an earlier draft it obtained, explicitly proposing a citizenship question, excluding refugees and asylees from the count and changing how members of the military would be tallied.

The proposal calls for excluding non-U.S. citizens without a green card from a key set of 2030 census results, NPR reported. Those numbers are used for congressional apportionment, Electoral College votes, redistricting at multiple levels of government and the distribution of federal funding for public services.

The 14th Amendment says apportionment must be based on the “whole number of persons in each state.” NPR reported that the U.S. census has never excluded residents because of immigration status, though earlier counts had constitutional instructions on enslaved people and “Indians not taxed.” The proposal is expected to face legal challenges.

The rule also raises the possibility of adding a legal-status question to the short census form. “The Census Bureau welcomes comments on the inclusion of a legal-status question on the short-form decennial census questionnaire,” the rule says, according to Talking Points Memo.

Trump tried during his first term to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census, but the effort failed at the Supreme Court. In a 5-4 decision, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote that the administration’s stated reason for adding the question was “contrived.” Trump also failed before leaving office in 2021 to subtract U.S. residents without legal status from the 2020 apportionment count.

The new proposal would also redefine “usual residence.” In 2020, that meant the place where someone “live and sleep most of the time,” according to Talking Points Memo. Under the proposed rule, it would be narrowed to a place “consistent with, and evidenced by, their tax records.”

NPR reported that the administration is also proposing to stop using the census to ask about race and ethnicity, a topic included in the national count since 1790. Civil rights advocates, researchers and other supporters of the census race question warn that removing it could put at risk federal data used for redistricting, Voting Rights Act enforcement, other antidiscrimination protections and policymaking.

Another part of the proposal would bar the census from asking about sexual orientation. The census has not directly asked that question before, though the 2020 count asked cohabiting couples to identify partners as “opposite-sex” or “same-sex.”

The proposal comes months before the administration is due to send Congress an April 1 report on proposed topics for the 2030 census. Congress has final authority over the count under the Constitution, NPR reported.

Trump called in an August 2025 social media post for work on a “new” census that would leave out millions of people living in the United States without legal status, NPR reported. Republican lawmakers and some GOP-controlled states have backed similar efforts to exclude some or all noncitizens from census numbers.

Census advocates have warned that the push could reduce participation in the 2030 count, particularly among Latino residents, whom the Census Bureau has historically undercounted.