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NRF Comment on Administration’s Proposed Changes to Census Residence Criteria & Demographic Questions

A Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) issued by the Census Bureau would make several significant, detrimental changes to the 2030 Census. 

The Trump Administration is trying – again – to politicize the decennial census.

During the first Trump Administration, the Census Bureau attempted to include a citizenship question on the 2020 Census. After multiple lawsuits, including one filed by the NRF, the Supreme Court blocked the proposed question for violating the Administrative Procedure Act (APA). The Trump Administration then tried to exclude undocumented people from the apportionment count after the 2020 Census was completed, but the NRF again successfully sued to stop them. President Trump was ultimately unable to manipulate the census count before leaving office in January 2021.

The second Trump Administration has renewed both of those efforts, but with a more aggressive approach to attempting to weaponize the 2030 Census. This renewed effort now also includes even more egregious changes, such as eliminating the race and ethnicity questions to undermine the critical use cases for that data. Overall, the proposals lack merit, directly contradict the constitutional and statutory text, and inexplicably break from the Census’s 230-year history. 

In response to the administration’s Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (“NPRM”), submitted by the Secretary of Commerce and the Census Bureau, the NRF submitted a formal comment through the administrative procedure process opposing several aspects of the NPRM on October 30, 2026. 

The NRF’s comment makes clear that each of the NPRM’s proposals is not only ill-conceived, but unlawful.

While the Census Bureau normally engages in an expert-driven process that takes a formalized, unbiased, and apolitical approach to create the residence criteria and the demographic questions included in the decennial census questionnaire, the Trump Administration’s proposed changes amount to nothing more than a laundry list of political priorities. If these rules are allowed to take effect, the Bureau will produce an inaccurate census that will harm millions of Americans by distorting representation, misallocating federal funding, and provoking anxiety among immigrant communities. 

Below is a summary of the NPRM and the NRF’s comment in response:

  1. NPRM Proposal: Excluding noncitizens from the census. The Trump Administration proposes excluding any noncitizen who is not a lawful permanent resident (green card holder) from the apportionment count. 

    NRF Response: The Secretary may not exclude noncitizens. Intentionally refusing to count millions of Americans runs counter to the Constitution’s mandate to conduct an actual enumeration—a full count of all people living in the United States. Excluding millions of American residents from the census would deny States billions of dollars in federal funding that is allocated in accordance with census data and would affect the apportionment of congressional seats. 

    The Constitution requires that the census count every person—and for 230 years, the courts, Congress, and the Executive Branch have all consistently understood this to include noncitizens. The Census Bureau’s mandate to count the total population of the States in the decennial census necessarily means that noncitizens must be counted.
  2. NPRM Proposal: Including a citizenship question.

    NRF Response: The Secretary’s reasoning is incoherent and adoption of this proposal would be unlawful. The Bureau’s own research has found that a citizenship question makes the census less accurate, as it would increase incomplete, incorrect, and falsified responses. Adding a citizenship question would result in a disproportionate undercount of undocumented people, noncitizens, individuals of Hispanic or Latino origin, and those sharing a household with those groups. This will misallocate billions of dollars in federal funding.
  3. NPRM Proposal: Using tax records to evidence a person’s usual residence. 

    NRF Response: The Secretary does not have the authority to enact this tax rule. The census seeks to determine where people residing all across the country live, not where they pay taxes. Moreover, the IRS does not have tax records for over 45 million people, and an IRS mailing address can be different from where someone lives for many reasons. Misusing tax data in this way will result in an undercount or miscount of tens of millions of Americans, improperly shift billions in federal funding, and wildly distort population data nationwide.
  4. NPRM Proposal: Setting a new three-month “Enumeration Period” instead of asking Americans to be counted where they live as of April 1 – otherwise known as Census Day. The Secretary proposes a new “census enumeration period” between January 3 and April 1, and asks for estimates of where people spent the most time over that period, a more complicated question to answer. 

    NRF Response: The census must be taken as of a single date: April 1. Every census since the founding has operated with reference to a single calendar day, and the Secretary has no authority to change this. This proposal can only be explained as a political ploy designed to shift millions of “snowbirds” from Democratic-leaning northern States to Republican-leaning southern States and will miscount the thousands of Americans who move every day.
  5. NPRM Proposal: Cutting all race and ethnicity questions.

    NRF Response: The Secretary’s reasoning is incoherent and unlawful. The Bureau has included a question about race on every census questionnaire since 1790. Local, state, and federal governments; public health institutions; news organizations; businesses; and many more regularly use race and ethnicity data. Accurate racial data is especially important for civil rights litigation—especially for enforcing voting rights laws and fighting gerrymandering. The Secretary claims, without evidence, that including race and ethnicity questions lowers the response rate, but that conflicts with the Bureau’s own research.

The NRF calls on the Census Bureau to withdraw this deeply flawed and dangerous NPRM, which flouts the Constitution, federal law, and nearly 230 years of practice. The NRF will use every tool at its disposal to ensure that the 2030 Census is a fair and accurate representation of the American population. 

The NRF’s full comment is here.