Among the dozens of Biden-era executive orders that President Trump revoked on Monday was one that had reversed the first Trump administration's unprecedented policy of altering a key set of census results.
Since the first U.S. census in 1790, no resident has ever been omitted from those numbers because of immigration status. And after the Civil War, the 14th Amendment has called for the population counts that determine each state's share of U.S. House seats and Electoral College votes to include the "whole number of persons in each state."
Biden's now-revoked 2021 order affirmed the longstanding practice of including the total number of persons residing in each state in those census results. It was issued in response to Trump's attempt during the national tally in 2020 to exclude millions of U.S. residents without legal status.
That effort began with a failed push to add a citizenship question to census questionnaires, which the U.S. Supreme Court ultimately blocked from the 2020 forms.
Biden's order also effectively ended a Trump administration-initiated project at the Census Bureau to produce neighborhood block-level citizenship data using government records. That data, a GOP redistricting strategist once concluded, could be "advantageous to Republicans and Non-Hispanic Whites" when voting districts are redrawn.
It's not clear yet if the second Trump administration would revive these census-related efforts. In his new order, Trump said revoking Biden's order "will be the first of many steps the United States Federal Government will take to repair our institutions and our economy."
Conservative groups behind the "Project 2025" plan have included adding a citizenship question among their priorities for a conservative administration. And a growing number of Republican members of Congress, including Rep. Chuck Edwards of North Carolina, have introduced bills that call for using the next head count to tally non-U.S. citizens living in the country and then subtract some or all of those residents from what are known as the congressional apportionment counts.
Trump's second term is set to end before final decisions have to be made on what questions the 2030 census will ask and who ends up getting included in the apportionment counts.
Though it had an opportunity during the first Trump administration, the Supreme Court has yet to rule on whether the president can exclude people who are in the country without legal status from the tally that determines political power in the United States.
Edited by Benjamin Swasey
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