Democrats on the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform urged the Census Bureau to remove a citizenship question from a 2026 practice test for the 2030 census, warning the change could affect how accurately the government counts the population, congressional Democrats said Thursday.
In a letter to acting Census Bureau Director George Cook and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick—whose department oversees the Census Bureau—Democrats warned that using the citizenship question in upcoming on-the-ground tests could deter immigrant participation ahead of the next once-a-decade census.
The Democrats said the tests—planned in Huntsville, Alabama, and Spartanburg, South Carolina—are set to begin next month, as the Census Bureau conducts what it describes as practice work to improve the way it counts populations that were undercounted during the last census.
Democrats urged the Census Bureau to use a traditional census questionnaire instead of the American Community Survey form, which includes the citizenship question, arguing that keeping the question would lower participation by immigrants and people in mixed-status families.
“The Trump Administration is risking millions of taxpayer dollars to pursue policies which could fatally compromise the 2030 count before it even begins,” the lawmakers wrote in their letter to Cook and Lutnick.
The letter also described what lawmakers said immigrants and legal residents could face if they see citizenship questions in a federal data-collection effort, including fear, confusion and uncertainty over enforcement, according to the letter’s description of “mixed-status families,” including green card holders and other legal permanent residents.
Democrats said the citizenship question could lead to undercounting by deterring people from participating, and they said the citizenship question’s presence in the test process raised concerns about who the administration might target next for denaturalization and deportation.
The Census Bureau and the Commerce Department did not immediately respond to emails seeking comment.
Beyond the citizenship question, the Census Bureau’s practice test includes other methodological changes. Democrats’ concerns came as the bureau’s recent plans for the 2026 test became public, including the use of U.S. Postal Service workers to perform tasks that had previously been done by census workers, and the elimination of several other planned test locations earlier described for that effort.
In addition to the Alabama and South Carolina locations, the Census Bureau had previously planned tests in Colorado Springs, Colorado, western North Carolina, western Texas and tribal lands in Arizona, according to the Democrats’ account of recent changes to the bureau’s test plans.
The dispute follows President Donald Trump’s earlier efforts to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census form, a move that was blocked by the U.S. Supreme Court, according to the Democrats’ summary of the prior episode. The letter said the administration’s orders were also rescinded when Democrat Joe Biden took office in January 2021 before 2020 census figures were released.
The lawmakers also pointed to constitutional language in the 14th Amendment, which they cited as requiring that “the whole number of persons in each state” be counted for apportionment purposes, and they said the Census Bureau has interpreted that to mean counting anyone living in the United States, regardless of legal status.
Separately, in a federal lawsuit in Louisiana, the Department of Commerce told the court Thursday that forthcoming criteria on who should be counted in the 2030 census could lead to the dismissal of a year-old lawsuit filed by four Republican state attorneys general. The court challenge sought to exclude people in the United States illegally from the figures used to redraw congressional districts, and federal government attorneys asked for a hold on the case while the bureau determines “the matter at the heart of this case”—whether and how to count citizens of foreign countries living in the United States for the 2030 census.