A Trump administration attorney said Monday that the numbers used for deciding how many congressional
seats each state gets won’t be ready until mid-February at the earliest, putting in jeopardy an effort
by President Donald Trump to exclude people in the country illegally from those figures.
The U.S. Census Bureau has found new irregularities in the head count data that determines congressional
seat allocations and the distribution of $1.5 trillion in federal spending each year, John Coghlan, a
deputy assistant Attorney General, said during a court hearing.
Not having the apportionment numbers finished before President-elect Joe Biden is sworn in on Jan. 20
will jeopardize an effort by President Donald Trump to exclude people in the country illegally from the
apportionment count since the numbers will be delivered under the supervision of a Biden administration.

The numbers could be pushed back even later in February from the expected Feb. 9 date, Coghlan said.
"It’s a continuously moving target," he said.
Under federal law, the Census Bureau is required to turn in the numbers used for allocating congressional
seats by Dec. 31, but the bureau announced last week that the numbers wouldn’t be ready. At the time,
the Census Bureau said it would finish the apportionment numbers in early January, as close to the
end-of-year deadline as possible.
The new February date was made public during a hearing for a federal lawsuit in San Jose, California.
The California lawsuit was originally brought by a coalition of municipalities and advocacy groups that
had sued the Trump administration in order to stop the census from ending early out of concerns that a
shortened head count would cause minority communities to be undercounted. The coalition of
municipalities and advocacy groups currently is seeking data and documents to help assess the accuracy
of the 2020 census.
Attorneys for the coalition had argued that the head count, as well as the data processing schedule, was
shortened in order to make sure that Trump was still in office so that his apportionment order to
exclude people in the country illegally was enforced. An influential GOP adviser had advocated excluding
them from the apportionment process in order to favor Republicans and non-Hispanic whites.
Trump’s July order on apportionment was challenged in more than a half-dozen lawsuits around the U.S.,
but the Supreme Court ruled last month that any challenge was premature.
Outside statisticians were worried about the timetable the Census Bureau was given for crunching the
numbers after the head count ended in October — about half the time originally planned. During the data
processing phase, duplicate responses are eliminated, information gaps are filled in by using records
and checks are made on the quality of the data.
The new irregularities discovered by the Census Bureau should come as no surprise, said Rob Santos,
president of the American Statistical Association, in an email Monday night.
Even with the extra time to process the data, Santos said he worried that racial and ethnic minorities
will still be undercounted.
"I appreciate the need for target dates but hope and expect that the Census Bureau would double down
on its commitment to focus primarily on the quality of the apportionment counts, however long that
takes," Santos said.
Meanwhile, attorneys for the coalition said they plan to seek court sanctions against Trump
administration attorneys for refusing to turn over data and documents they are seeking.
Attorneys for the coalition said Monday in a court filing that the Department of Justice has produced
data reports for only half of the requests they have made. When Trump administration attorneys did
provide information, it was buried in thousands of pages of irrelevant material such as emails for pizza
and handbag advertisements and LinkedIn notifications, according to the court filing.
The attorneys for the coalition described the Trump administration’s playbook as "deny information
and the existence of documents; produce dribs and drabs only when ordered or uncovered; attempt to hide
as many documents as possible under exaggerated and improper claims of privilege; and do everything to
try and run out the clock."
In the same court filing, the Trump administration attorneys said they haven’t violated any orders to
produce documents, adding that any blame should be on the coalition’s attorneys for making their
requests too broad.
In some cases, the government attorneys said they are still working to provide the requested information.
In other cases, the requests would require the Census Bureau to write new code in order to make data
inquiries that would be "unduly burdensome as the employees needed to search for this data are the
same employees who are trying to finish the census," the government attorneys said.
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