CENSUS/TRUMP AS PRESIDENT: “The Census Bureau has scrapped a plan to overhaul how it asks about race and Hispanic ethnicity in the 2020 Census, after the Trump administration delayed making a decision on the matter in time for the rollout.
As a result, the Census will keep separate questions for race and Hispanic ethnicity instead of combining them. It also will not add a planned category called ‘Middle Eastern/North African.’ Both changes had undergone extensive testing, including a nationally representative survey of 1.2 million households in 2015. Census Bureau experts endorsed both changes last year.
Albert Fontenot Jr. , who heads the Census 2020 program, told a review panel Friday that the White House Office of Management and Budget didn’t clear the change in time for the bureau’s testing schedule.
The Trump administration hasn’t taken a public stance on the changes. An OMB spokesman didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment on why it hadn’t made a decision in time for the Census to implement them for 2020…
Backers of the changes said the new question format better reflects how people talk about race and ethnicity, and would boost the accuracy of the Census count. Critics saw the changes as exercises in so-called identity politics, by asking Americans to further categorize themselves along racial and ethnic lines… Advocacy groups criticized the move.”
-Paul Overberg, “Census Change to Race, Ethnicity Questions Shelved by Trump Administration Delay,” The Wall Street Journal online, Jan. 30, 2018 11:06am