The Trump administration is proposing major changes to the 2030 census that could affect political representation, voting maps and how race and ethnicity are recorded in the once-a-decade population count.
The proposal, posted Wednesday, would change two basic parts of the census: who is counted for dividing up House seats and what demographic questions appear on the form sent to every household.
To divide House seats among the states, the proposal would generally exclude non-U.S. citizens without lawful permanent resident status.
That approach would leave people living in the country illegally out of the apportionment total. The Wall Street Journal reports the administration is also seeking feedback on whether some other legal statuses, including refugees and holders of work or student visas, should qualify.
Trump has previously floated the idea of excluding unauthorized immigrants from census counts, something met with pushback. Local leaders said they should be counted because those people use local services regardless of legal status, and excluding them creates a gap in population-based funding and actual demand.
The rule is still at the proposal stage and will go through a public-comment period.
A different count for House seats
The census determines reapportionment, or how the 435 House seats are distributed among the states. Reapportionment then dictates redistricting, while House representation affects each state’s Electoral College total.
The administration argues that some noncitizens lack the ties to the United States needed to count them for congressional apportionment.
That would mark a major shift from past census practice. NPR reports previous national counts have not used a resident’s immigration status as a basis for leaving that person out. Trump had already called for excluding unauthorized immigrants from the census in August 2025.
Trump pursued a different census change during his first term, seeking to add a citizenship question to the 2020 form. The Supreme Court rejected the administration’s stated rationale and sent the matter back to the agency. The question ultimately was not added.
Race and ethnicity questions would be removed
A separate part of the proposal would keep questions about race and ethnicity off questionnaires used to enumerate the population in the 2030 census. The proposal would not restrict the Census Bureau from asking demographic questions on the American Community Survey or other surveys not used to enumerate the population.
That would be a major change. The Journal reported that a race question has appeared on every census since the first national count in 1790.
The administration says race and ethnicity data are not needed to meet the census’ constitutional purpose of counting the population.
The Center for American Progress and other civil rights advocates warn that losing those responses from the decennial census could affect work ranging from drawing voting districts to enforcing voting and antidiscrimination laws.
The proposal would also bar the census from asking about sexual orientation, a question that has not appeared directly on previous census forms.
A reversal from recent planning
The race and ethnicity proposal runs counter to recent Census Bureau planning.
Before the Trump administration’s proposal, the bureau had been preparing for more detailed race and ethnicity data in 2030. A Federal Register notice published in 2024 asked the public to weigh in on how detailed racial and ethnic identities should be coded once the American Community Survey and the 2030 census introduced a combined race-and-ethnicity question. The bureau said the work was intended to improve how it would process and report detailed responses.
Federal standards revised during the Biden administration called for collecting race and ethnicity in a single question. They also added Middle Eastern or North African as a category and placed Hispanic or Latino alongside the other response options.
The new proposal would remove race and ethnicity questions from the population-enumeration forms altogether.
What happens next
The proposal will go through public comment before any final rule takes effect. Congress also has authority over the census, and legal challenges could follow if the administration finalizes the changes.
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