Experts independently resurrect Census Bureau advisory committee axed by
Trump administration
[September 18, 2025]
By MIKE SCHNEIDER
A U.S. Census Bureau advisory committee made up of scientific experts
that was axed by the Trump administration earlier this year is
resurrecting itself and meeting Thursday with no official blessing or
formal ties to the statistical agency.
The reconstitution of the Census Scientific Advisory Committee,
rechristened with an “Independent” in front of its name, is a defiant
gesture by the research community against the Trump administration's
elimination last winter of three advisory committees made up of outside
experts from private industry and academia.
Unlike in past meetings, no Census Bureau staffers will be involved
directly or indirectly during Thursday's conference.
“Will our scientific advice still find an ear at the Census Bureau? I do
not know,” said University of North Carolina sociologist Barbara
Entwisle, who chairs the committee. “However, it is a certainty that our
recommendations will have no effect at all if we do not provide them.”
The decision to get the committee members back together is the latest
effort by statisticians, demographers and other researchers to challenge
statistical-system changes that they see as worrisome since President
Donald Trump returned to the White House in January for a second term.
Since then, data sets related to gender, sexual orientation, health,
climate change and diversity have disappeared from federal websites, and
workers and contractors who had been data guardians at statistical
agencies either have departed or been forced out by efforts to shrink
the federal government. Last month, Trump fired the head of the Bureau
of Labor Statistics after the agency made downward revisions to the
number of jobs created in the spring.
Just last week, the Census Bureau said it “was not able to renew” a
contract that maintained a website for an online community of users for
its largest survey of American life.
And last month, Trump instructed the Commerce Department to have the
Census Bureau start work on a new census that would exclude immigrants
who are in the United States illegally from the head count, which
determines political power and federal spending. The 14th Amendment says
that “the whole number of persons in each state” are to be counted for
the once-a-decade census, and any changes to how the census is conducted
requires congressional approval.
During a confirmation hearing on Wednesday, Joyce Meyer, who has been
nominated to be an under secretary of the Commerce Department, which
oversees the Census Bureau, dodged a direct question about whether Trump
should be able to conduct a new census without Congress changing the
law, but said she would comply with the law.
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Immigration activists rally outside the Supreme Court as the
justices hear arguments over the Trump administration's plan to ask
about citizenship on the 2020 census, in Washington, April 23, 2019.
(AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite, File)
Besides the Census Scientific Advisory Committee, the U.S. Commerce
Department last winter killed the Census Advisory Committee, which
advised on the upcoming 2030 census, and the National Advisory
Committee, which offered insight on how to accurately count and
collect data from racial, ethnic and other communities. At the time,
U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said the committees’ purposes
“have been fulfilled."
A coalition of civil rights groups were dismayed by the committees'
elimination, describing them in a letter to Lutnick as "a major
setback” for the bureau as it prepared for the 2030 census and
modernized the work of data collection.
“Eliminating these committees ... threatens the bureau’s ability to
collect accurate, comprehensive demographic and economic data,” they
said in the May letter sent by the Leadership Conference on Civil
and Human Rights.
Before the committees were eliminated, the Census Bureau had
appointed their members. The agency's top leaders attended the
committees' biannual meetings and received their recommendations.
Members of the advisory committees worked for free except for travel
expenses and lodging for meetings.
In a statement, the Census Bureau said Wednesday that the agency
gets outside input through a rulemaking process for the federal
government that invites the public to make comments.
When asked if the Census Advisory Committee might follow the path of
the reconstituted scientific panel, Arturo Vargas, its former
chairman, said in an email, “We are still discussing options and
determining how best to use the scant resources to have the most
impact, and exploring how another independent advisory committee is
valued added.”
Allison Plyer, a past chair of the scientific advisory committee,
said that the Census Bureau has always benefited from the strategic
advise of committee members who are experts in their fields.
“They don't have that now," said Plyer, chief demographer at The
Data Center in New Orleans. “An outside perspective is incredibly
important.”
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