Trump officials propose sweeping changes to the census that would reshape voting maps

The Trump administration is proposing major changes to how the U.S. government produces census results for the next national head count in 2030. While the plan faces likely legal challenges, such changes would affect the population numbers used to determine each state's share of representatives in Congress and votes in the Electoral College, redraw maps of voting districts for all levels of government and distribute federal funding for public services. The administration's proposal, which was released online Wednesday, calls for an unprecedented exclusion of non-U.S. citizens without a green card from a key set of 2030 census results that the 14th Amendment says must include the "whole number of persons in each state." Trump officials are also proposing to stop using the census to ask about people's race and ethnicity, a topic that the national tally has included since the first count in 1790.

Many civil rights advocates, researchers and other supporters of the census race question warn the administration's plan puts at risk future federal data used for redistricting, enforcing the Voting Rights Act and other antidiscrimination protections and informing policymaking. Another key part of the proposal would ban the U.S. census from including a question about people's sexual orientation. While the government has not directly asked about that topic before on census forms, the 2020 count did ask couples living together to describe their partners as either "opposite-sex" or "same-sex." The first Trump administration blocked an earlier effort to add a sexual orientation question to the Census Bureau's American Community Survey, which the Justice Department under Democratic administrations has said is needed, alongside a gender identity question, to generate statistics that could help protect LGBTQ+ people from discrimination.

The administration's proposal comes months before it is supposed to send a report by April 1 on the proposed question topics for the 2030 census to Congress, which has final authority over the count under the Constitution. While the country's past tallies beginning in 1790 had specific instructions from the Constitution about how to count enslaved people and not to count "Indians not taxed," the U.S. census has never left out residents because of their immigration status. That kind of change would also have ripple effects on public policymaking, scientific research and business decisions that rely on data from the once-a-decade census.

But this latest push by Trump officials faces constitutional hurdles, as well as the possibility of a new presidential administration reversing any changes to 2030 census plans after coming into office in 2029. The proposal comes after President Trump put out a social media post in August 2025 that directed his administration to start work on a "new" census amid a congressional gerrymandering fight that he started. Trump called for the count to leave out millions of people living in the U.S. without legal status.

According to the Constitution, the president does not have final authority over the census. Before Trump's first term ended in 2021, his administration tried and failed to add a census question about U.S. citizenship status. Trump also failed to carry out his bid to subtract U.S. residents without legal status from the 2020 census apportionment counts that are used to redistribute congressional seats and Electoral College votes among the states.

As the current Trump administration pushes for census changes, Republican lawmakers in Congress are backing similar proposals to exclude some or all noncitizens in recent years. And some GOP-controlled states have filed lawsuits that call for residents without legal status and those with nonimmigrant visas to be left out of census numbers. One of those states is Missouri, where that kind of change to census results could lead to a radical shift in state legislative redistricting that moves political power away from younger, more racially diverse urban areas and toward older, whiter rural areas.