Heritage 2025: the Census
It can be hard to sink your teeth into Project 2025. There is so much jargon, so many specifics, so many agencies and programs, it can be hard to understand. This paper looks at just a single federal agency: the Census.
I never appreciated the scope and importance of the Census until my stint as Adams County’s Complete Count Director during the 2020 Census. There are few agencies where it’s more important to keep politics out. The Census generates financial information that governments and businesses rely on for developing growth plans. The numbers must be trustworthy. All the economic plans in the country are worthless if these numbers are suspect. But the Census count is even more important. It’s used to determine who gets how much federal resources and it directly affects power: apportionment of seats in the House of Representatives, electoral votes, and state legislative seats.
So it’s worrisome to read in the third sentence of the document: “ … will require that both committed political appointees and like-minded career employees are immediately put in place to execute a conservative agenda.”
This is a statement about far more than the conduct of the Census, though it says plenty about that. But it’s really a statement about government: that everything is partisan, that the point of government is to reward your allies and screw your adversaries.
Reading on, we find a concern about “lack of conservative participation” in the partnership program during he 2020 census. The partnership program, according to the document, aims to “promote responsiveness to the census by employing trusted voices in various communities.” It makes sense such funding would skew away from “conservative groups.” There is general consensus that disadvantaged communities, Hispanics, the homeless, Native Americans, low income families, immigrants, and other disadvantaged groups are the hardest to count and represent the highest risk of an undercount. Little point would be served by pushing turnout aggressively in affluent white suburbs – they already filled it out. It is indeed true that local communities approach the count from a partisan perspective: they want every bit of representation and very federal dollar they can get. But the people doing the counting should be scrupulously non-partisan.
Of course, we need to understand that the authors of this report are the aggrieved group who agree there indeed is a victim class in America that needs civil rights protection from rampant discrimination: white men. So perhaps it’s unsurprising that their complaint about 2020 is that “lack of conservative participation was one factor in an undercount …” Oh, if only they had been able to reach those hidden masses in The Villages.
Other worrisome comments include:
· Any successful conservative administration must include a citizenship question …
· The data under Biden Administration proposals could be used to bolster progressive political agendas.
When we were working on the 2020 census, we found a surprising level of suspicion – from all sides of the political spectrum – of the Census Bureau’s motives. Militia types thought it was a precursor to gun confiscation and FEMA Camps; immigrants feared deportation. In 2020, it was at least possible to assure suspicious people that their data was totally safe. In 2030, my counterpart might have to say, “Well, yeah, you’re quite right to be concerned.”
One small agency, but it makes the point. This is Project 2025: a deep digging, sophisticated effort to politicize EVERYTHING the government does.