No one seems to know who ordered the Census Bureau to end its once-in-a-decade tally on Sept. 30.
With just a week to go, Census staff and community groups are scrambling to count as many people as possible.
Due to the coronavirus and natural disasters that threw off the Census timetable, the Census Bureau, the Trump administration and community partners agreed to extend the original Sept. 30 deadline a month to Oct. 31.
The Commerce Department's inspector general has concluded that the order to revert to the Sept. 30 deadline did not come from the Census Bureau. according to ABC News. Even the bureau's director doesn't know who ultimately made the call, says the department's watchdog.
"The schedule change was not the Bureau’s decision, nor was it the first time the 2020 Census schedule had been changed. Senior officials at the Bureau, including the Director, did not know who ultimately made the decision to accelerate the Census schedule," the inspector general report states.
Returning to the Sept. 30 will not provide an accurate count, say community agencies partnering with the Census Bureau.
So far, the Census Bureau claims that 95.4% of households in the U.S. either from self-submitted responses or field data collection, have been counted.
However, in some states, including Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Montana, that percentage is under 90%.
The Census is not going well for New York City and Los Angeles, home to the country's largest immigrant communities. The count effort for NYC is at 60%, and even worse for L.A. at 57.2%, far below the national average.
The low counts mean those cities and states could lose representation in Congress and get short-changed for federal funds for social services and infrastructure.
"Clearly, there are political motivations to change the timeline and particularly to close off the census and the count early, because what that's going to do is bias the final count," said Paul Ong, director of UCLA's Center for Neighborhood Knowledge and a former Census Bureau adviser.
"It's going to lead to a substantial undercounting of low income people, and people of color, and the political implication to that is very clear: by excluding them from the count you also bias the reapportionment process and the redistricting process," Ong told ABC News.
"There are real political motivations to essentially bias the final count because certain parties will gain from it at the expense of people they consider not worthy of being included," Ong told ABC News. "And so, again, I'm not surprised if this is true, because politicians play politics, and certainly one could play politics with the census to skew and bias the outcomes in their favor."
"There are real political motivations to essentially bias the final count because certain parties will gain from it at the expense of people they consider not worthy of being included," Ong told ABC News. "And so, again, I'm not surprised if this is true, because politicians play politics, and certainly one could play politics with the census to skew and bias the outcomes in their favor."
EDITOR'S NOTE: This is a developing story. Check back later for updates.
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