Republican push to make U.S. census surveys voluntary alarms statisticians
46 comments
·November 17, 2025delichon
zamadatix
In practice I don't think anyone has been charged for denying the census in many many years. In law, it's not actually voluntary and you're pretty much riding on the census takers not caring lately rather than any actual status of whether the census is voluntary. If unpopular ancestry were a target of the census data again then I'd bet the lack of caring from the census takers goes away too, and the law needn't change to support that.
Regardless, this is actually about the ACS anyways.
gdulli
Semi-related, I've been getting calls from the CDC lately to take a phone survey about immunizations. I know the calls are from legit government numbers, they're not a scam. But I can't bring myself to contribute data to whatever twisted narrative they're going to push with it.
There's a good chance I'm overthinking it and being paranoid, but I'd never have had that resistance under any other Republican administration in the past.
dimal
Most people here are reading the headline and thinking that they’re pushing to make the census voluntary. The article actually says that they’re pushing to make the American Community Survey (ACS) voluntary. These are different things. According to the article, the ACS was started in 2006 and is conducted every year.
I’m not defending what the Republicans are doing. I’m just clarifying it, so at least people can discuss what’s actually happening instead of having knee jerk reactions.
stackskipton
I’ve gotten ACS twice and refused both times over how intrusive it is. You can read the survey here: https://www2.census.gov/programs-surveys/acs/methodology/que...
My biggest complaint about it is it’s used a ton by private sector so it’s basically government sponsored research for companies.
lotsofpulp
Would you rather the data only be visible to well funded companies?
stackskipton
So we need this bailout to even the playing field?
hodgehog11
This is an important distinction, but I don't believe it negates the other discussion as far as the principle involved.
hodgehog11
Judging from the past, making the census voluntary in the same way as the vote in federal elections would have this peculiar capacity to be used to skew the results in favor of any result the designers should choose. So of course this should be pushed by the Republicans. It's much easier to avoid unpleasant facts when you can effectively erase the existence of inconvenient groups of people.
austin-cheney
Although that is a possible reason the stated reason for more than a decade is minimal constitutionality. Republicans and conservative groups have long claimed to advocate for smaller government and minimal access to any data except for that required to perform government's mandates according to the various governmental agency charters.
The reason for the census comes directly from the US constitution and its only stated purpose there is to redistribute congressional districts and Electoral College electors.
My own personal opinion favors giving government as much access to data as possible because contrary to what many people claim government is overwhelmingly more productive compared to the private sector.
crims0n
> contrary to what many people claim government is overwhelmingly more productive compared to the private sector
People always make this about public vs private sector but in my experience, it has more to do with the size of the organization. Large private sector organizations are just as susceptible to the slow-as-molasses bureaucratic processes as big government. Similarly, I have seen local governments be as fast-moving and agile as a startup. The simple reality is, the more people and processes are involved, the longer things take.
hodgehog11
> to what many people claim government is overwhelmingly more productive compared to the private sector
Whoa, that's a very strong statement that requires some refinement I think.
In any case, I understand the claimed reasons, but I remain skeptical. Sometimes making something "voluntary" is not in the interests of freedom or small government. I'm sure the founding fathers were aware of that.
> to redistribute congressional districts and Electoral College electors
That's extremely important and has been used to "remarkable" effect in recent years.
schmidtleonard
> that's a very strong statement that requires some refinement
Yes, but much of that refinement would be the gritty details of pushing back on awful self-serving definitions that were carefully crafted to mislead. Flouting them altogether is a strong opener.
Contrast to the boring analytical speech: "The notion of value espoused by neoliberal economics is wealth-weighted while the colloquial definition of the word does not have a wealth-weight attached, sometimes even the opposite (see: feeding orphans). This loophole is large enough to march 1000 elephants through and wage a class war. "Value Creation" is not about doing what people want, it's about doing what wealth-weighted people want, and as inequality grows that increasingly means doing what rich people want, which is primarily to pump assets so that they can get paid for being rich. This twist of terminology is how you can brainwash someone into thinking that enshittification, in all its forms, is somehow for the greater good, when it's actually just for the good of rich people who want to get paid for being rich."
The boring analytical speech is theoretically the stronger argument, but if theoretically stronger arguments won elections we wouldn't be here. So the best move is just to reverse-uno the "government bad, drown it in a bathtub, private sector good" propaganda.
terminalshort
Every interaction I have ever had with the government contradicts this. So does every person I know who has a job that involves frequent interaction with the government.
schmidtleonard
When you drive to work, you yearn for a negotiation with the local road monopoly?
On cold nights, you dream of a glorious future where an unregulated energy utility could try to trick you into surge pricing?
When you wrote your post, you did so with teeth clenched in disgust at having to use a government invention?
When you take the trash out, you wish it were a bit more exciting, that you had to dodge gunfire from skirmishing warlords?
And so on, and so on, but the point is that a statement you probably intended as a slight hyperbole actually required a staggering amount of "out of sight, out of mind."
plussed_reader
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ur-whale
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bryanlarsen
Yes, the Republicans are putting their anti-truth bias on public display.
QuadmasterXLII
Seeing every issue in black and white is simplistic, and can cause issues. Seeing shades of gray is better. Attempting to avoid bias by seeing only a single shade of gray, as you are suggesting, is obviously not going to be very effective for percieving the world.
afavour
Is it bias when informed by observable fact?
nilamo
It's not a bias if it's just history repeating.
catlikesshrimp
Not even mentioning last names (Steube and Risch)
"Language in a pending 2026 spending bill written by the Republican-led U.S. House of Representatives goes further. It would make both the ACS and the regular 10-year census voluntary, and would also prohibit the agency from reaching out more than once to anyone who doesn’t initially respond."
rayiner
That's incorrect. Since the Trump era, it's Republicans that benefit from higher turnout, while Democrats benefit from low turnout (like midterm elections). According to the New York Times: "New data, based on authoritative voter records, suggests that Donald Trump would have done even better in 2024 with higher turnout." https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/26/upshot/turnout-2024-elect... see also https://www.npr.org/2025/06/26/nx-s1-5447450/trump-2024-elec... ("But even if everyone who could vote did, Trump would have won by an even wider margin, 48%-45%, according to Pew's validated voters survey.").
saghm
When "higher turnout" is still low enough in national elections that the missing amount is more than the differential in the popular vote, this doesn't disprove anything. You're citing an approximate statistical poll to try to mitigate that, but the entire point of the census is that right now the way it works is to try its best _not_ use those methods and instead attempt to actually get responses from everyone.
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JumpCrisscross
> That's incorrect. Since the Trump era, it's Republicans that benefit from higher turnout, while Democrats benefit from low turnout
The variance in voting preferences dominates this effect. We simply have insufficient data to make statements like this confidently, a fact being laid bare by the potential fuckup that has been the Texas redirecting.
hodgehog11
It may be clear with the benefit of hindsight that a higher turnout in 2024 would have further benefited Trump. But the Republicans have not typically acted with the intention to make it easier for arbitrary members of the public to vote (happy to be corrected), and I don't expect them to act in this interest in the future.
0xbadcafebee
Soon:
"What poor/vulnerable people? There's none in the US, look at the census data! Clearly we don't need to do anything for them!"
FTA:
"The ACS, an offshoot of the decennial census, contains roughly 70 questions on housing, employment, education, health, military service, and other demographic details. Each question has been ordered by Congress or requested by an agency to carry out its mission. “But some of them are pretty invasive,” says a spokesperson for Steube, citing questions about when someone begins their daily commute to work and whether they have difficulty getting dressed."
They're sensitive, not invasive. And the whole point is to find out if there are people with sensitive needs, so we can help them.
The Republican party just doesn't like the idea of helping people. Anything that could improve people's lives gives them the willies.
hermannj314
The inital goal of counting every person for determining congressional appointments seems trivial in our modern surveillance state. I feel like we know this answer every minute of every day even without a census.
I don't understand why it became a 70 question survey you are forced to answer. A core value of America is our right to obstruct any government attempt to improve our lives and I defend that stubborness.
hodgehog11
> A core value of America is our right to obstruct any government attempt to improve our lives and I defend that stubborness.
I think this is a reinvention of history, because much of American history, and the writings of the founders, do not seem to imply this. The core value to my understanding is "no taxation without representation", probably followed by freedom of speech (from government). I don't think this is true anymore though, given how many people are happy for the king to impose taxes on them at will.
jewayne
> A core value of America is our right to obstruct any government attempt to improve our lives and I defend that stubborness.
Nobody tell this guy about how the interstate highways got built. Or about how we eradicated a dozen diseases. Or how civilization works, in general.
nicole_express
People fought interstate highway construction too. In some cases, they were right; people in the Boston area are generally pretty happy the pushback against the Inner Belt that would've demolished half of Cambridge was successful.
hereme888
Political clickbait title.
Corrected title:
"Republican bills would make the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey voluntary and bar enforcing mandatory responses to any census survey, citing privacy concerns and raising data-quality warnings."
sbuttgereit
From the article...
"Language in a pending 2026 spending bill written by the Republican-led U.S. House of Representatives goes further. It would make both the ACS and the regular 10-year census voluntary, and would also prohibit the agency from reaching out more than once to anyone who doesn’t initially respond."
That text included a link to the bill: https://docs.house.gov/meetings/AP/AP00/20250910/118544/BILL...
From that bill I imagine they mean (page 146)
"SEC. 605. None of the funds in this Act may be used to enforce involuntary compliance, or to inquire more than twice for voluntary compliance with any survey conducted by the Bureau of the Census."
hereme888
You're right. Corrected my comment.
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martythemaniak
The Canadian conservative government (2006-2015) tried that and it contributed significantly to their embarrassing defeat in 2015. They won a solid majority in May 2011, then out of the blue in June 2011 they announced the upcoming census would get rid of the detailed long-form version which is the basis for how the government decides and justifies where and how resources are spent. This was not mentioned in the election campaign at all, was not on any mainstream person's mind, the census was not opposed by anyone other than random western fringe groups, so when the conservatives made a big push for it, people sensed that they wanted to get of data and reality that contradicted conservatives views and policies.
This change was still a significant issue more than four years later in the 2015 election. The long-form census was re-instated the day after the Liberal government took power and people were genuinely happy to fill out their 2016 census.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Canadian_census#Voluntary...
I think we can all guess how this will turn out down south.
josefritzishere
Years ago when it became apparent that there was a schism between the Republican platform, and the median values of Americans I thought that inevitably Republicans would tack to the middle, that their platform would evolve as the way to remain relevant. Both parties have done that in the past.
I did not forsee what we see today: blatant attempts to maintain power through force and subversion of the electoral system.
giraffe_lady
Any reflection on why you didn't foresee it, or your relationships to the people who did? Because a lot of people did see it, after all, and consistently got scolded for being partisan or "hysterical." The republicans have been increasingly clear about their goals for over a generation, dropping all euphemism and pretense about a decade ago.
Herring
What do you mean median values? Trump 2020 won the most votes of any sitting president ever. Then he won the popular vote in 2024.
I think the problem is the entire culture itself. Democracy is about a kind of equality among people, and yet too many people don't really believe in that. If you like meritocracy, that's not equality. If you like capitalism, well it strongly tends towards economic inequality, which historically breaks down the democratic order. If you like American supremacy over China, male dominance over women, white supremacy over minorities, etc power fantasies. Honestly given US history (slavery etc) I'm surprised democracy has lasted so long here.
cindyllm
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theturtle
[dead]
It is voluntary. The two times I have been approached by census takers I declined to participate. They had no problem with that, everything stayed friendly, they thanked me and left. There was never a consequence.
The last time, during the last census, the census worker asked me why. I asked her if she knew about census data being used to round up U.S. citizens with unpopular ancestry and put them into concentration camps. She didn't, so I told her a little about the Japanese internment when my father was a teenager, and that I too have unpopular ancestry, and would prefer not to be on their list. She was agreeable.