Elections and Redistricting

The Trump administration has sharply reduced this year’s key 2026 field test for the 2030 census, cutting its scope from six states plus a national sample down to just two in‑person test sites in Spartanburg, S.C., and Huntsville, Ala., according to a new Federal Register notice. The revised plan drops previously selected rural communities in western Texas and tribal lands in Arizona and North Carolina, including the Fort Apache and San Carlos Apache reservations and the Qualla Boundary of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, raising alarms among census experts about under‑testing methods in exactly the kinds of areas that were undercounted in 2020. The Census Bureau will also experiment with using U.S. Postal Service workers instead of temporary enumerators and has scrapped Spanish- and Chinese‑language online forms for the test, which will now be English‑only, even as the country grows more linguistically diverse. The changes come after the administration disbanded all of the bureau’s external advisory committees, refused to brief key members of Congress on 2030 planning, and oversaw significant departures of experienced census staff amid broader federal workforce cuts. Advocates warn on social media that these moves, combined with funding uncertainty and delays around counting people in group quarters like dorms and nursing homes, risk degrading the accuracy of the 2030 count, with downstream effects on House apportionment, redistricting fights and distribution of federal dollars for a decade.