Experts On How Trump’s Census Overhaul Could Hurt Black Americans

The Trump administration is attempting to rewrite Census rules once again—a move that civil rights advocates warn takes direct aim at Black political power and billions in federal funding. Speaking exclusively with The Root, racial-equity advocate Anneisha Hardy and data equity director Meeta Anand break down how the proposed overhaul threatens to dismantle 14th Amendment protections and suppress Black representation from the courtroom to the ballot box.

The administration’s proposed overhaul of the 2030 Census would change who is included in the population count used to determine congressional representation, including by excluding certain noncitizens, as we previously reported. It would also eliminate race and ethnicity questions from the decennial census questionnaire and rely more heavily on administrative records to determine where people live.

Sounds technical. But for Hardy, executive director of Alabama Values and a racial-equity advocate, said the bigger issue is what happens when the country changes how it counts people while communities are already fighting to preserve their political power.

“Counting was never separate from power in this country,” Hardy said. “It was also about whose presence would be converted into political power and who will actually get to exercise that power.”

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That question has a particularly ugly history for Black Americans. Hardy points to the Constitution’s original three-fifths compromise, when enslaved people were counted for purposes of representation while being denied political rights.

“Black people were counted, but they were never represented,” she told us. “Their bodies increased the political power of the very states that enslaved them.”

Anand, the Senior Director of Census & Data Equity for The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, connected that history to the 14th Amendment, which established the principle that apportionment is based on the “whole number” of persons in each state.

“What we see is, each person counts as a person,” Anand said. “We are counting every person. That is what the 14th Amendment guarantees us.”

And then there’s the race question… literally. The administration frames the proposed changes around accuracy, privacy, efficiency and a more “colorblind” census, according to POLITICO. But Hardy argues that stripping race from the data doesn’t magically strip race from American life.

“Color blindness is not the same as power blindness,” she said. “If the underlying inequality is still there, removing race from the way we measure the country does not remove the racial hierarchy and disparities.”

“It just makes it harder to document,” she added.

That’s where Anand says the stakes extend far beyond demographic spreadsheets. Census data helps determine congressional representation and federal funding, supports enforcement of civil rights laws and provides the baseline for countless other datasets used to understand communities.

“If you’re undercounting communities, then those communities are not getting their fair share of dollars,” Anand told us.

That can affect schools, hospitals, transportation and other public services. It can also affect whether researchers and civil-rights advocates have the data necessary to identify discrimination in housing, employment, voting and health care.

The proposal’s increased reliance on administrative records raises another question: What happens when the government’s paperwork doesn’t match people’s actual lives?

“Tax records are not always indicative of where someone lives,” Anand said, noting that a mailing address on a tax document isn’t necessarily someone’s residential address– a distinction that’s especially apparent for college students and military families, whose mailing and residential addresses may differ.

Hardy argues that the larger fight is about visibility and, ultimately, power. “If the legal tools for challenging unequal representation go away, the quality of the data that communities use to see inequality becomes even more important,” she said.

And that brings the census back to its most basic question. “The real question has always been, who benefits from the counting?” Hardy said.

The proposed changes could face significant legal and political challenges. For now, they remain proposals– not settled changes to the 2030 Census. But for Hardy, the history makes one thing clear: The census has never been just about counting heads.

“Being counted and having power are not the same thing,” she said. And in America, who gets counted has always been part of the fight over who gets heard.