A regulatory filing shows the Trump administration is considering adding a citizenship question to this year’s field test intended to help plan the 2030 census. The proposal follows President Trump’s earlier call for a census that would exclude people in the country without legal status — a change supporters say could affect congressional apportionment and Electoral College allocations.
Several Republican lawmakers have pushed similar ideas to remove some or all noncitizens from the population totals used to allocate House seats and Electoral College votes. Critics point to the 14th Amendment, which requires apportionment counts to include “the whole number of persons in each state.” Multiple GOP-led states have filed lawsuits seeking to force the Census Bureau to subtract residents without legal status and people on nonimmigrant visas, such as international students and diplomats, from apportionment counts. Missouri’s suit, for example, asks that those groups be excluded from all census counts, including those used to distribute federal funds.
The Census Bureau says the 2026 field test will not be used to change political representation. Instead, the test is intended to inform planning for the 2030 census and will contribute to a report on proposed question topics that the bureau must deliver to Congress in 2027. The questionnaire proposed for the test is based on the longer American Community Survey (ACS) rather than the shorter decennial census form. In addition to citizenship status, the draft asks about income sources, whether a home has a bathtub or shower, and whether it is connected to a public sewer, among other items.
The draft does not incorporate race and ethnicity changes approved by the Biden administration for 2030 — including a separate checkbox for people who identify as Middle Eastern or North African and adjustments to Hispanic or Latino categories — and a White House official said the Trump administration is considering rolling back those changes.
The operational test has been scaled back and is now scheduled to run between April and September, covering roughly 155,000 households in Huntsville, Ala., and Spartanburg, S.C. Federal law bars the Census Bureau from releasing information that would identify an individual to anyone, including other federal agencies and law enforcement.
Advocates warn that including a citizenship question could depress response rates among historically undercounted groups, particularly immigrant households and mixed-status families, amid heightened immigration enforcement and public concern about data use. Census Bureau research from past years has found that adding a citizenship question would likely reduce responses among the least-responsive populations and undermine overall accuracy.
During the first Trump administration, the Supreme Court blocked a proposed citizenship question for the 2020 census and later declined to rule on whether a president could exclude people without legal status from apportionment counts. The Census Bureau’s filing to the White House Office of Management and Budget describes the proposed test form as one that “will ask no questions of a sensitive nature.” The decision whether to include a citizenship question in the field test now rests with OMB.