Editor’s note: On August 15, CHN hosted a webinar, Project 2025’s Threat to Human Needs Programs. This is the second of a three-part series that examines the issues that were raised during the discussion. You can read the first part here.

Politicizing the Census Bureau. Adding a citizenship question to the decennial Census. Weaponizing and politicizing data collection. Undermining decennial Census and American Community Survey questions. 

These are only some of the things Project 2025 has in store for the Census Bureau if its radical agenda has its way.  

Meeta Anand, Senior Director, Census and Data Equity, for the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, recently foreshadowed what the Census Bureau would look like under the plan from the Heritage Foundation, which helped lead Project 2025. 

She calls the Census Bureau “our most important agency for getting data on who we are as a country.” 

Project 2025’s proposals, she says, would “undermine the bureau’s infrastructure in order to produce politicized, inaccurate, and unreliable datasets, making it impossible to understand society, enforce civil rights, advance equity agendas, or engage in evidence-based policymaking.” 

Census data is used to apportion House seats by state and to redistrict at the federal, state, and local levels. It is also used to allocate federal funds for many of the most important programs meeting human needs, including Medicaid, CHIP, child care, foster care, housing, education, WIC, and others. When census data is degraded some federal funding is lessened, and federal funds do not reach the communities and people that need them most.  

Among the proposals Project 2025 has for the Census Bureau: 

• Replacing data experts with political appointees who are loyal to the President rather than the public interest. 

• Adding a citizenship question to the decennial census. Anand says this would reduce response rates so much that it would result in a less accurate census that would “skew representation, distort federal funding, provide a misleading depiction of our society, and lead to ‘pre-gerrymandered’ districts.” 

• Recommending that the incoming administration take control of and “thoroughly review any changes” to recent improvements to race and ethnicity data standards, claiming there are “concerns among conservatives” that these new standards could be “skewed to bolster progressive political agendas.” 

• Undermining numerous other efforts to collect data, simply because the data might reveal information that Project 2025’s authors do not like. Meanwhile, it calls for highly intrusive new forms of data collection. 

“Taken as a whole (these rules) would basically put a thumb on the scale as to what we are collecting as data, rendering it no longer accurate or reliable or allowing us to understand who we are, allowing us to make targeted policy decisions,” Anand said. 

Anand added that the fight over whether to add a citizenship question to the 2030 Census is not over – not by a long shot. She noted that the Supreme Court ruled on that issue on procedural grounds. 

“This is a fight that is in the past. This is a fight that is in the present. This is a fight that is in the future, and it will be a fight whether or not we have a change of administration, because it is a fight we undergo all the time,” she said. “If you think that that question is done and dusted because the Supreme Court ruled on it in 2019? It is not.” 

If you want to learn more about Project 2025’s threats to the census, join the Leadership Conference webinar September 18 by registering here.