Purging federal agencies of experts who work on some of our most complex public policy challenges has nothing to do with rooting out waste in government.
It is about undermining democracy and building a new bureaucracy that serves the president’s partisan goals and wealthy supporters. It’s about slowly stripping away fair representation and replacing it with a system where powerful oligarchs call the shots regardless of whether they have been fairly elected.
Our news feeds are inundated with ways our system of government is under attack, but the plot is thicker than you might think. The essential building blocks of our democracy are being stripped away before our eyes.
Amid the wave of federal government resignations and firings over the last few weeks, news about former Census Bureau director Robert Santos flew under the radar. His resignation is not normal bureaucratic reshuffling. Santos, a statistician with 40 years of experience and a leader in nonpartisan data analysis, resigned before his term was set to end in 2027.
His departure raises serious concerns about the integrity of the coming decennial census, a critical constitutional requirement that determines political representation and federal funding for communities nationwide.
If we are to learn from President Trump’s first term in office, the resignation of Santos is the first domino to fall in an effort to entrench power and federal money within communities that already have money, power and influence.
This isn’t just speculation — it’s history repeating itself.
In 2019, Trump attempted to politicize the census by removing noncitizens from apportionment counts for the first time in modern American history.
Common Cause stopped Trump by obtaining evidence that political operatives have spent years plotting to rig our democracy by manipulating the census. First, The New York Times publicized a shocking study, written by Thomas Hofeller, the GOP’s chief gerrymandering mastermind. Hofeller laid out a plan to add a citizenship question to the decennial census, draw legislative districts based on a citizen-only count, and ensure the census was politically “advantageous to Republicans and Non-Hispanic Whites.”
Then, Common Cause found evidence that Hofeller communicated with a political appointee in the Census Bureau about citizenship data when the department was preparing to re-engineer the 2020 Census.
Together, the documents undermined the Trump administration’s laughable claim that it added a citizenship question to the census to more effectively enforce the Voting Rights Act. Research shows that a citizenship question skews census data by reducing participation and that citizenship data can continue to be obtained by other Census Bureau surveys.
By sharing Hoffler’s files with the plaintiffs in Department of Commerce v. State of New York, Common Cause revealed the secret role played by the “Michealangelo of gerrymandering” — the late Thomas Hofeller — in orchestrating the addition of the citizenship question. The Supreme Court struck down the citizenship question on the ground that the Trump administration lied about its justification for adding it.
Watchdogs like Common Cause are on guard to ensure the Trump administration doesn’t again try to politicize the census count for partisan political gain. It is imperative that the next Census Bureau director is not a partisan and has the experience and knowledge to conduct an unbiased and accurate census. Any effort to politicize the process by the administration or Congress must be resisted.
The Three-Fifths Compromise of 1787 counted enslaved Black people as only three-fifths of a person for congressional apportionment. That system deliberately reduced the political influence of Black communities while allowing slave states to inflate their representation in Congress.
Today, removing noncitizens from representation in Congress would have a similar effect — it would diminish representation for communities of color while giving disproportionate power to White, Republican-led districts. It’s a new Three-Fifths Compromise, repackaged for the 21st century.
Trump’s attack on the 14th Amendment by rejecting birthright citizenship means that no one should feel safe from this threat to our immigrant friends, family and neighbors. Unless, of course, you have what the president and the oligarchs who back him value most — money, influence and power.
Editor’s note: Keshia Morris Desir is the voting and elections policy counsel at Common Cause. She wrote this for InsideSources.com, Please send your comments to AzOpinions@iniusa.org. We are committed to publishing a wide variety of reader opinions, as long as they meet our Civility Guidelines.
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