District Court Halts Administration's Plan to Rush Census

Steven D. Schwinn, University of Illinois Chicago Law School

Judge Lucy H. Koh (N.D. Cal.) ruled this week that the Trump Administration's late summer plan to rush census data collection likely violated the Administrative Procedure Act. The ruling halts the implementation of the plan.

The ruling is a blow to the Trump Administration and its latest effort to alter or manipulate census data.

The case arose when the Census Bureau first suspended census operations and then pushed back internal deadlines for census data collection and analysis because of collection problems related to COVID-19. (For one, the Bureau couldn't keep census data doorknockers on the payroll: they kept quitting out of fear of contracting COVID.) The Bureau also announced that it wouldn't be able to meet statutory deadlines for reporting census data. The Bureau said that under its regular deadlines the census would be incomplete and inaccurate.

But then in early August, the Bureau abruptly reversed course and issued the "Replan." The Replan "accelerate[d] the completion of data collection and apportionment counts by our statutory deadline of December 31, 2020 . . . ."

The problem was that the Bureau itself--and the Bureau's unanimous Scientific Advisory Committee, and the GAO, and the Commerce Department's Inspector General--concluded that the Replan increased the risks of an incomplete and inaccurate 2020 census.

Plaintiff organizations and local jurisdictions sued, arguing that the Replan violated the APA and the Enumeration Clause and sought to halt its implementation. The court ruled that the case was justiciable, that the plaintiffs had standing, and that the Replan likely violated the APA. (It did not rule on the Enumeration Clause, because it didn't have to. The APA ruling was enough to say that it likely violated the law.) As to the APA claim, the court wrote:

[T]he Court agreed that Plaintiffs are likely to succeed on the merits of their APA arbitrary and capricious claim for five reasons: (1) Defendants failed to consider important aspects of the problem, including their constitutional and statutory obligations to produce an accurate census; (2) Defendants offered an explanation that runs counter to the evidence before them; (3) Defendants failed to consider alternatives; (4) Defendants failed to articulate a satisfactory explanation for the Replan; and (5) Defendants failed to consider reliance interests.