Terry Gerton Meeta, let me start with you. We’re gonna talk about the census today. Seems hard to believe that it’s almost time for another decennial census, but the Census Bureau is proposing changes to who gets counted and what information gets collected. Help us understand exactly what they’re suggesting and why it matters.

Meeta Anand Thank you so much Terry and Denice for having me here. So the Census Bureau is proposing changes on who is counted, how they’re counted, and where they’re counting. So as to who is counting, what we normally see per the 14th Amendment is that we are supposed to count all persons, that is all inhabitants of the United States for the purposes of the census. And what is being proposed is an exclusion of certain non-citizens, anyone who doesn’t hold what we consider a green card. So think of people like students, H-1B visa holders, refugees, asylees, DACA, TPS, like I can go down the list, but basically it’s excluding a whole swath of people. And that’s contrary to the dictates of the Constitution. The other thing that that does is it makes us wonder how will they figure out who those people are and either it might be inaccurate because we’re using inaccurate administrative records or it’ll cause suppression in response rates because people will be asked about their citizenship or immigration status. So it would start having the effect not only of excluding people, but messing with the responses itself. The second part is how they will be counted. And there we’re looking at no longer asking people their race or ethnicity on the decennial census and that is pretty shocking. I think people just assume it’s in there. People have their notions of the census like this is one of our major institutions of American life. It upholds our democracy and ever since 1790 on the first census, the question of race and ethnicity has been included. Ethnicity later, but at least race. And I do not want to gloss over the sordid past. We do know there used to be a three-fifths clause. That was erased by the 14th Amendment, which says it’s a count of whole persons. But we have always used race and ethnicity to understand who we are and what our needs are and what are changing demographics are. So to exclude that is to deny our knowledge of who we are as a country and what our different lived experiences are. And I think like would shock people to think like not to be able to understand like who we’re comprised of. To not include that is to blind ourselves, is to is to render people invisible. And the third part is more administrative, figuring out where to count people. It’s usually based on where people reside most of the time, their usual residence, and now they’re introducing proposed changes that will base it on W-2 forms. I don’t know how much you recollect your last tax filing, but that address is not necessarily your residence. That could be your mailing address. It could be a P.O. Box, or it could be you tax filers address. So that also starts introducing some changes that muddy the waters. So we’re concerned that implementing these types of changes now might make things so confusing, so difficult to operationalize, and lead to such inaccuracies, plus data that is less than what we’re used to having, that’ll really hobble our ability to plan as a country for the needs of our communities.

Terry Gerton Denice, Meeta has made a passionate plea for no changes, that this data is essential. What are the people who are proposing this making as their case?

Denice Ross The short answer is that they’ve said that race and ethnicity data are no longer necessary.

Terry Gerton But obviously they are. So we’ll get into that in a minute. Denice Ross is the director of the data policy Institute at the Federation of American Scientists. And Meeta Anand is senior director of census and data equity for the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights. So Meeta, let me come back to you. Race and ethnicity obviously matter. You started to describe that. What is it about the country that we can’t see if we don’t collect the data?

Meeta Anand Well, I think there are several ways to think about this. I have it bucketed in terms of civil rights enforcement. So we have civil rights laws on the books that need enforcing. The Fair Housing Act, Voting Rights Act, you’ve got equal employment opportunities, these are all civil rights laws that are still on the book, should still be enforced, and we also have states that have their own version. So we cannot enforce those laws without having the necessary underlying race and ethnicity data. So that’s one. Two is what does it mean at the state and local level to do planning? Whether it be for federal disaster management, emergency management, whether it be for hospital beds or whether it’s simply understanding transportation planning and where should roads go? Finally, the last bit I think is one people don’t think about as much, which is that whether or not you are using census data, you’re likely using census data. So, so many other public data sets and private data sets rely on the census as the denominator. And that’s not just for the big number, like 330 million people the last go around. It’s also that breakdown. So when people do surveys, they weight it based on the race and ethnicity numbers that they get from the census. So many, many data sets that are statistical samples, they are then weighting those samples based on the denominator provided by the census, which includes those race and ethnicity data. So this would also degrade the quality of public and private data across the board.

Terry Gerton Denice, walk us through a couple of use cases. Where does a local government official or a federal official use this data and maybe not even think about it?

Denice Ross Yeah. Well, I’ll give you an example from when I was working at the city of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, we needed to renegotiate the garbage pickup contracts because the population had changed. And census data are the way that that local garbage contractor knows how to right size their bid so that they know one, how many households there are and where they are. And two, what the typical household size is, because that tells you about how much garbage might they be putting out to the curb. And so that local contractor can’t make an accurate bid if they don’t have the census data. And if they under bid that contract because they didn’t have the right data, there will literally be garbage in the streets. And so having an undercount or, you know, people misplaced because of methodological reasons means that we could have garbage in streets. Another example I’ll give you that’s more about the public health side of things, and that is if you look at suicide prevention, we have race and ethnicity data in the mortality data that comes into the CDC, and also there’s surveys that get a sense for suicidal ideation. And if you’re looking at intervening to reduce the suicide rate, you need to know which populations are most affected because you’re going to be intervening differently. If it’s a teenage girl that you’re trying to intervene with, then who’s having suicidal ideation, the best intervention is probably going to be something that’s school based and engaging with her peers. But if you’re looking at the highest risk for suicide, that would be older white men living in rural America. And the most appropriate, like a great starting place for an intervention for them would be to give away free gun locks at gun stores and firing ranges because research shows that a gun lock just introduces enough friction to reduce suicide.

Terry Gerton Denice, thanks for those really practical examples. And now, Meeta, let me come back to you because, I mean, there’s obviously implications for making these changes, but we are just a few years out from the 2030 census. We’re already deep into testing and prototyping and testing the math models and those kinds of things. Isn’t it a little bit late in the process to be making these kinds of radical changes?

Meeta Anand Absolutely, and I would add to that. It is not only late in the process to make these types of changes, but in the proposed rule that we’ve been talking about, we don’t see evidence that these changes have been tested for how they will roll out, whether it will improve accuracy. And I would say that the number one goal of the census is to count everyone once, only once and in the right place. And changes should be made towards the goal of counting everyone and if changes are made that move away from counting everyone or reduce the accuracy, i.e. make it less likely that we’re going to count everyone, then that is not a good change to make and there is no evidence that these changes are towards the goal of improving accuracy.

Terry Gerton Denice, you’ve been making the case in daily videos on LinkedIn talking about the power of the denominator. What kind of reaction are you getting to your videos? Are they reaching people in a different way?

Denice Ross They are, I’ve also ventured into Instagram and I’ve learned how to make my own videos at my kitchen table. And interestingly, so each one of these videos we’ve covered so far, we’ve covered how census data informs responses to train derailments, the delivery driver, how they help delivery drivers bring home more tips on how they help make sure your kindergarten class is the right size. The suicide example that I gave earlier, how census data are used to fight crime, and how they’re used to help pick up the garbage. And of those that I’ve done so far, the ones that have a personal connection do much better in terms of people reposting and liking them, which for me, I think is a really great story about how we engage with the federal government and that certainly your lived experience is very valuable in understanding why these data are important. And especially when you’ve got lived experience plus subject matter expertise on using these data. So I would challenge anyone who is a user of federal data and especially the decennial census, which chances are you are — if you’re doing any data work, you gotta have a denominator — to get out there and make the case both from a personal and professional connection to why it matters.

Terry Gerton And Meeta, this proposed rule is out for comment. What do you want people to know?

Meeta Anand Well, I want people to respond and respond to posing the proposed changes. And I would recommend that they go to the Hands Off Our Census website where we make it easy for people to understand how to respond to comments and how to do it quickly and easily. And the comment period ends October 13th.