The Trump administration revealed that participants in this year’s field test of the 2030 census may be asked about their U.S. citizenship status, according to a regulatory filing for the test. The proposal follows President Trump’s public call last year for a “new” census that would, for the first time, exclude people living in the country without legal status — a push tied to efforts to redraw voting maps that could benefit Republicans in congressional apportionment and the Electoral College.
A growing number of Republican lawmakers have backed similar plans to exclude some or all non-U.S. citizens from the population counts used to determine each state’s share of House seats and Electoral College votes. Critics note that the 14th Amendment requires apportionment counts to include “the whole number of persons in each state.” Multiple GOP-led states have also filed lawsuits seeking to force the Census Bureau to subtract residents without legal status and those on nonimmigrant visas (such as international students and diplomats) from apportionment counts; Missouri’s suit seeks to exclude these groups from all census counts, including those used to distribute federal funds for public services.
The results of the 2026 field test will not be used to redistribute political representation. Instead, the test is meant to inform planning for the 2030 census and will feed into a report on planned question topics that the bureau is to deliver to Congress in 2027.
The planned test questionnaire is drawn from the American Community Survey (ACS), a much longer annual survey, rather than the shorter decennial census form. In addition to citizenship status, the test form asks about sources of income, whether a home has a bathtub or shower, and whether it’s connected to a public sewer, among other items. The draft form does not incorporate the Biden administration’s approved changes to racial and ethnic categories for the 2030 census — including new checkboxes for “Middle Eastern or North African” and for “Hispanic or Latino” distinctions — and a White House official said the Trump administration is considering rolling back those changes.
The Census Bureau recently announced major cutbacks to the operational test, which is now scheduled to take place between April and September and involve roughly 155,000 households in Huntsville, Ala., and Spartanburg, S.C. As with all Census Bureau surveys, federal law prohibits the agency from releasing information that would identify an individual to anyone, including other federal agencies and law enforcement.
Despite legal protections, advocates worry that adding a citizenship question will deter participation among historically undercounted populations, especially immigrant households and mixed-status families, amid heightened immigration enforcement and contentious government handling of data. Bureau research has previously found that adding a citizenship question would likely reduce response rates among the least-responsive populations and undermine the accuracy of the count.
During the first Trump administration, the U.S. Supreme Court blocked a proposed citizenship question from the 2020 census and later declined to decide whether a president could exclude people without legal status from apportionment counts. In its filing to the White House Office of Management and Budget, the Census Bureau states the proposed test form “will ask no questions of a sensitive nature.” Whether the citizenship question will move forward in the field test is now up to OMB. Edited by Benjamin Swasey.