5 ms·

Republican push to make U.S. census surveys voluntary alarms statisticians

77 points by pseudolus 1y ago

hodgehog11 1y ago
Judging from the past, making the census voluntary in the same way as the vote in federal elections would have this peculiar capacity to be used to skew the results in favor of any result the designers should choose. So of course this should be pushed by the Republicans. It's much easier to avoid unpleasant facts when you can effectively erase the existence of inconvenient groups of people.
- ur-whale 1y ago
  [flagged]
  - QuadmasterXLII 1y ago
    Seeing every issue in black and white is simplistic, and can cause issues. Seeing shades of gray is better. Attempting to avoid bias by seeing only a single shade of gray, as you are suggesting, is obviously not going to be very effective for percieving the world.
  - bryanlarsen 1y ago
    Yes, the Republicans are putting their anti-truth bias on public display.
  - nilamo 1y ago
    It's not a bias if it's just history repeating.
  - catlikesshrimp 1y ago
    Not even mentioning last names (Steube and Risch) "Language in a pending 2026 spending bill written by the Republican-led U.S. House of Representatives goes further. It would make both the ACS and the regular 10-year census voluntary, and would also prohibit the agency from reaching out more than once to anyone who doesn’t initially respond."
  - afavour 1y ago
    Is it bias when informed by observable fact?
- rayiner 1y ago
  [flagged]
  - hodgehog11 1y ago
    It may be clear with the benefit of hindsight that a higher turnout in 2024 would have further benefited Trump. But the Republicans have not typically acted with the intention to make it easier for arbitrary members of the public to vote (happy to be corrected), and I don't expect them to act in this interest in the future.
    - rayiner 1y ago
      Republicans and Trump supporters are two overlapping but distinct groups. A lot of establishment Republican approaches were based on ideas that are obsolete in the Trump era. Trump can win enough Bangladeshi immigrants in Queens or Hindi nationalists in New Jersey to win the popular vote. Mitt Romney Republicans can’t. There is nothing about right-wing politics that inherently benefits from a limited electorate. After all, Latin American countries regularly flip-flop between far-left and far-right leaders, like in Brazil with Bolsonaro, or Modi in India. The increase in immigrants in the U.S. and expansion of the electorate to include them won’t get rid of “Republicans,” like many had hoped. Instead, it simply changed what kind of right-wing party could form a viable majority coalition.
  - JumpCrisscross 1y ago
    > That's incorrect. Since the Trump era, it's Republicans that benefit from higher turnout, while Democrats benefit from low turnout The variance in voting preferences dominates this effect. We simply have insufficient data to make statements like this confidently, a fact being laid bare by the potential fuckup that has been the Texas redirecting.
    - rayiner 1y ago
      Both Pew and Blue Rose Research have confidently stated that Trump would have won by 3-5 points if everyone had voted. These conclusions were based on thousands to millions of samples, far more than a typical poll.
- austin-cheney 1y ago
  Although that is a possible reason the stated reason for more than a decade is minimal constitutionality. Republicans and conservative groups have long claimed to advocate for smaller government and minimal access to any data except for that required to perform government's mandates according to the various governmental agency charters. The reason for the census comes directly from the US constitution and its only stated purpose there is to redistribute congressional districts and Electoral College electors. My own personal opinion favors giving government as much access to data as possible because contrary to what many people claim government is overwhelmingly more productive compared to the private sector.
  - terminalshort 1y ago
    [flagged]
    - plussed_reader 1y ago
      [flagged]
    - schmidtleonard 1y ago
      When you drive to work, you yearn for a negotiation with the local road monopoly? On cold nights, you dream of a glorious future where an unregulated energy utility could try to trick you into surge pricing? When you wrote your post, you did so with teeth clenched in disgust at having to use a government invention? When you take the trash out, you wish it were a bit more exciting, that you had to dodge gunfire from skirmishing warlords? And so on, and so on, but the point is that a statement you probably intended as a slight hyperbole actually required a staggering amount of "out of sight, out of mind."
      - deburo 1y ago
        Unless you agree with the US's current budget (and the staggering debt it entails), you can't say that the government is particularly efficient.
josefritzishere 1y ago
Years ago when it became apparent that there was a schism between the Republican platform, and the median values of Americans I thought that inevitably Republicans would tack to the middle, that their platform would evolve as the way to remain relevant. Both parties have done that in the past. I did not forsee what we see today: blatant attempts to maintain power through force and subversion of the electoral system.
- giraffe_lady 1y ago
  Any reflection on why you didn't foresee it, or your relationships to the people who did? Because a lot of people did see it, after all, and consistently got scolded for being partisan or "hysterical." The republicans have been increasingly clear about their goals for over a generation, dropping all euphemism and pretense about a decade ago.
- Herring 1y ago
  What do you mean median values? Trump 2020 won the most votes of any sitting president ever. Then he won the popular vote in 2024. Honestly given US history (slavery, individualism etc) I'm surprised democracy has lasted so long here. The Economist rates the US as a "flawed democracy", it has been undergoing erosion for a long time.
  - skissane 1y ago
    > Democracy is about a kind of equality among people, and yet too many people don't really believe in that. If you like meritocracy, that's not equality. If you like capitalism, well it strongly tends towards economic inequality, which historically breaks down the democratic order. If you like American supremacy over China, male dominance over women, white supremacy over minorities, etc etc power fantasies. The word “democracy” comes from ancient Greece, most famously Athens - the term was coined to refer to Cleisthenes‘ reforms in the 5th century BCE - prior to that point only upper class men could vote, the “democratic” reforms extended voting rights to all male citizens who had completed their military training - so excluding women, slaves, freed slaves, resident foreigners, and men who hadn’t completed military training (which normally started around 18 and went for two years) - so only 10% to 20% of the population could vote, although that was still a lot more than prior to the reforms-before the reforms, power was limited to the top 1% or so of men, who came from the wealthiest families So your idea that democracy requires equality is completely ignoring the actual history of the word.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
martythemaniak 1y ago
The Canadian conservative government (2006-2015) tried that and it contributed significantly to their embarrassing defeat in 2015. They won a solid majority in May 2011, then out of the blue in June 2011 they announced the upcoming census would get rid of the detailed long-form version which is the basis for how the government decides and justifies where and how resources are spent. This was not mentioned in the election campaign at all, was not on any mainstream person's mind, the census was not opposed by anyone other than random western fringe groups, so when the conservatives made a big push for it, people sensed that they wanted to get of data and reality that contradicted conservatives views and policies. This change was still a significant issue more than four years later in the 2015 election. The long-form census was re-instated the day after the Liberal government took power and people were genuinely happy to fill out their 2016 census. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Canadian_census#Voluntary_long-form_survey_controversy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Canadian_census#Voluntary... I think we can all guess how this will turn out down south.
delichon 1y ago
It is voluntary. The two times I have been approached by census takers I declined to participate. They had no problem with that, everything stayed friendly, they thanked me and left. There was never a consequence. The last time, during the last census, the census worker asked me why. I asked her if she knew about census data being used to round up U.S. citizens with unpopular ancestry and put them into concentration camps. She didn't, so I told her a little about the Japanese internment when my father was a teenager, and that I too have unpopular ancestry, and would prefer not to be on their list. She was agreeable.
- zamadatix 1y ago
  In practice I don't think anyone has been charged for denying the census in many many years. In law, it's not actually voluntary and you're pretty much riding on the census takers not caring lately rather than any actual status of whether the census is voluntary. If unpopular ancestry were a target of the census data again then I'd bet the lack of caring from the census takers goes away too, and the law needn't change to support that. Regardless, this is actually about the ACS anyways.
  - jerlam 1y ago
    I am not sure if "not caring" is the right perspective. The census takers have a very limited ability to compel you to answer and are not going to show up on your doorstep with law enforcement or threaten fines for not answering. People threatening or attacking census workers isn't uncommon. This article is from 2010 and due to increased political polarization, it would probably be worse today: https://www.npr.org/2010/06/21/127988332/census-workers-face-vitriol-and-violence https://www.npr.org/2010/06/21/127988332/census-workers-face...
    - xtiansimon 1y ago
      > “The census takers have a very limited ability to compel you to answer…” True. But it’s about the data, right? I worked the 2010 census in my town. Obviously there is the escalation from mail-in to visit. But I recall there was some additional level after a refusal. In other words they don’t just treat a non-responsive or hostile home as a vacant lot.
hermannj314 1y ago
The inital goal of counting every person for determining congressional appointments seems trivial in our modern surveillance state. I feel like we know this answer every minute of every day even without a census. I don't understand why it became a 70 question survey you are forced to answer. A core value of America is our right to obstruct any government attempt to improve our lives and I defend that stubborness.
- jewayne 1y ago
  > A core value of America is our right to obstruct any government attempt to improve our lives and I defend that stubborness. Nobody tell this guy about how the interstate highways got built. Or about how we eradicated a dozen diseases. Or how civilization works, in general.
  - nicole_express 1y ago
    People fought interstate highway construction too. In some cases, they were right; people in the Boston area are generally pretty happy the pushback against the Inner Belt that would've demolished half of Cambridge was successful.
- hodgehog11 1y ago
  > A core value of America is our right to obstruct any government attempt to improve our lives and I defend that stubborness. I think this is a reinvention of history, because much of American history, and the writings of the founders, do not seem to imply this. The core value to my understanding is "no taxation without representation", probably followed by freedom of speech (from government). I don't think this is true anymore though, given how many people are happy for the king to impose taxes on them at will.
dimal 1y ago
Most people here are reading the headline and thinking that they’re pushing to make the census voluntary. The article actually says that they’re pushing to make the American Community Survey (ACS) voluntary. These are different things. According to the article, the ACS was started in 2006 and is conducted every year. I’m not defending what the Republicans are doing. I’m just clarifying it, so at least people can discuss what’s actually happening instead of having knee jerk reactions.
- hodgehog11 1y ago
  This is an important distinction, but I don't believe it negates the other discussion as far as the principle involved.
  - kbelder 1y ago
    Well, the survey is constitutionally mandated, whereas the ACS is just a law, so they exist on two different levels of enforceability and responsibility. The government can't not do a census; it's not permitted. The ACS can have its rules revised with no problem.
- stackskipton 1y ago
  I’ve gotten ACS twice and refused both times over how intrusive it is. You can read the survey here: https://www2.census.gov/programs-surveys/acs/methodology/questionnaires/2025/quest25.pdf https://www2.census.gov/programs-surveys/acs/methodology/que... My biggest complaint about it is it’s used a ton by private sector so it’s basically government sponsored research for companies.
  - lotsofpulp 1y ago
    Would you rather the data only be visible to well funded companies?
    - stackskipton 1y ago
      So we need this bailout to even the playing field?
hereme888 1y ago
Political clickbait title. Corrected title: "Republican bills would make the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey voluntary and bar enforcing mandatory responses to any census survey, citing privacy concerns and raising data-quality warnings."
- sbuttgereit 1y ago
  From the article... "Language in a pending 2026 spending bill written by the Republican-led U.S. House of Representatives goes further. It would make both the ACS and the regular 10-year census voluntary, and would also prohibit the agency from reaching out more than once to anyone who doesn’t initially respond." That text included a link to the bill: https://docs.house.gov/meetings/AP/AP00/20250910/118544/BILLS-119-FC-AP-FY2026-AP00-FY26CJSFullCommitteeMark.pdf https://docs.house.gov/meetings/AP/AP00/20250910/118544/BILL... From that bill I imagine they mean (page 146) "SEC. 605. None of the funds in this Act may be used to enforce involuntary compliance, or to inquire more than twice for voluntary compliance with any survey conducted by the Bureau of the Census."
  - hereme888 1y ago
    You're right. Corrected my comment.
theturtle 1y ago
[dead]
0xbadcafebee 1y ago
Soon: "What poor/vulnerable people? There's none in the US, look at the census data! Clearly we don't need to do anything for them!" FTA: "The ACS, an offshoot of the decennial census, contains roughly 70 questions on housing, employment, education, health, military service, and other demographic details. Each question has been ordered by Congress or requested by an agency to carry out its mission. “But some of them are pretty invasive,” says a spokesperson for Steube, citing questions about when someone begins their daily commute to work and whether they have difficulty getting dressed." They're sensitive, not invasive. And the whole point is to find out if there are people with sensitive needs, so we can help them. The Republican party just doesn't like the idea of helping people. Anything that could improve people's lives gives them the willies.
robocat 1y ago
New Zealand has its very last census in 2023 and is having no more. https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/in-depth/564560/the-traditional-census-has-been-switched-off-what-happens-now https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/in-depth/564560/the-traditional-c... So maybe it has nothing to do with US politics and is just a worldwide trend?

77 points by pseudolus 1y ago

Judging from the past, making the census voluntary in the same way as the vote in federal elections would have this peculiar capacity to be used to skew the results in favor of any result the designers should choose. So of course this should be pushed by the Republicans. It's much easier to avoid unpleasant facts when you can effectively erase the existence of inconvenient groups of people.

ur-whale 1y ago
[flagged]
- QuadmasterXLII 1y ago
  Seeing every issue in black and white is simplistic, and can cause issues. Seeing shades of gray is better. Attempting to avoid bias by seeing only a single shade of gray, as you are suggesting, is obviously not going to be very effective for percieving the world.
- bryanlarsen 1y ago
  Yes, the Republicans are putting their anti-truth bias on public display.
- nilamo 1y ago
  It's not a bias if it's just history repeating.
- catlikesshrimp 1y ago
  Not even mentioning last names (Steube and Risch) "Language in a pending 2026 spending bill written by the Republican-led U.S. House of Representatives goes further. It would make both the ACS and the regular 10-year census voluntary, and would also prohibit the agency from reaching out more than once to anyone who doesn’t initially respond."
- afavour 1y ago
  Is it bias when informed by observable fact?
rayiner 1y ago
[flagged]
- hodgehog11 1y ago
  It may be clear with the benefit of hindsight that a higher turnout in 2024 would have further benefited Trump. But the Republicans have not typically acted with the intention to make it easier for arbitrary members of the public to vote (happy to be corrected), and I don't expect them to act in this interest in the future.
  - rayiner 1y ago
    Republicans and Trump supporters are two overlapping but distinct groups. A lot of establishment Republican approaches were based on ideas that are obsolete in the Trump era. Trump can win enough Bangladeshi immigrants in Queens or Hindi nationalists in New Jersey to win the popular vote. Mitt Romney Republicans can’t. There is nothing about right-wing politics that inherently benefits from a limited electorate. After all, Latin American countries regularly flip-flop between far-left and far-right leaders, like in Brazil with Bolsonaro, or Modi in India. The increase in immigrants in the U.S. and expansion of the electorate to include them won’t get rid of “Republicans,” like many had hoped. Instead, it simply changed what kind of right-wing party could form a viable majority coalition.
- JumpCrisscross 1y ago
  > That's incorrect. Since the Trump era, it's Republicans that benefit from higher turnout, while Democrats benefit from low turnout The variance in voting preferences dominates this effect. We simply have insufficient data to make statements like this confidently, a fact being laid bare by the potential fuckup that has been the Texas redirecting.
  - rayiner 1y ago
    Both Pew and Blue Rose Research have confidently stated that Trump would have won by 3-5 points if everyone had voted. These conclusions were based on thousands to millions of samples, far more than a typical poll.
austin-cheney 1y ago
Although that is a possible reason the stated reason for more than a decade is minimal constitutionality. Republicans and conservative groups have long claimed to advocate for smaller government and minimal access to any data except for that required to perform government's mandates according to the various governmental agency charters. The reason for the census comes directly from the US constitution and its only stated purpose there is to redistribute congressional districts and Electoral College electors. My own personal opinion favors giving government as much access to data as possible because contrary to what many people claim government is overwhelmingly more productive compared to the private sector.
- terminalshort 1y ago
  [flagged]
  - plussed_reader 1y ago
    [flagged]
  - schmidtleonard 1y ago
    When you drive to work, you yearn for a negotiation with the local road monopoly? On cold nights, you dream of a glorious future where an unregulated energy utility could try to trick you into surge pricing? When you wrote your post, you did so with teeth clenched in disgust at having to use a government invention? When you take the trash out, you wish it were a bit more exciting, that you had to dodge gunfire from skirmishing warlords? And so on, and so on, but the point is that a statement you probably intended as a slight hyperbole actually required a staggering amount of "out of sight, out of mind."
    - deburo 1y ago
      Unless you agree with the US's current budget (and the staggering debt it entails), you can't say that the government is particularly efficient.

josefritzishere 1y ago

Years ago when it became apparent that there was a schism between the Republican platform, and the median values of Americans I thought that inevitably Republicans would tack to the middle, that their platform would evolve as the way to remain relevant. Both parties have done that in the past. I did not forsee what we see today: blatant attempts to maintain power through force and subversion of the electoral system.

giraffe_lady 1y ago
Any reflection on why you didn't foresee it, or your relationships to the people who did? Because a lot of people did see it, after all, and consistently got scolded for being partisan or "hysterical." The republicans have been increasingly clear about their goals for over a generation, dropping all euphemism and pretense about a decade ago.
Herring 1y ago
What do you mean median values? Trump 2020 won the most votes of any sitting president ever. Then he won the popular vote in 2024. Honestly given US history (slavery, individualism etc) I'm surprised democracy has lasted so long here. The Economist rates the US as a "flawed democracy", it has been undergoing erosion for a long time.
- skissane 1y ago
  > Democracy is about a kind of equality among people, and yet too many people don't really believe in that. If you like meritocracy, that's not equality. If you like capitalism, well it strongly tends towards economic inequality, which historically breaks down the democratic order. If you like American supremacy over China, male dominance over women, white supremacy over minorities, etc etc power fantasies. The word “democracy” comes from ancient Greece, most famously Athens - the term was coined to refer to Cleisthenes‘ reforms in the 5th century BCE - prior to that point only upper class men could vote, the “democratic” reforms extended voting rights to all male citizens who had completed their military training - so excluding women, slaves, freed slaves, resident foreigners, and men who hadn’t completed military training (which normally started around 18 and went for two years) - so only 10% to 20% of the population could vote, although that was still a lot more than prior to the reforms-before the reforms, power was limited to the top 1% or so of men, who came from the wealthiest families So your idea that democracy requires equality is completely ignoring the actual history of the word.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

martythemaniak 1y ago

The Canadian conservative government (2006-2015) tried that and it contributed significantly to their embarrassing defeat in 2015. They won a solid majority in May 2011, then out of the blue in June 2011 they announced the upcoming census would get rid of the detailed long-form version which is the basis for how the government decides and justifies where and how resources are spent. This was not mentioned in the election campaign at all, was not on any mainstream person's mind, the census was not opposed by anyone other than random western fringe groups, so when the conservatives made a big push for it, people sensed that they wanted to get of data and reality that contradicted conservatives views and policies. This change was still a significant issue more than four years later in the 2015 election. The long-form census was re-instated the day after the Liberal government took power and people were genuinely happy to fill out their 2016 census. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Canadian_census#Voluntary_long-form_survey_controversy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Canadian_census#Voluntary... I think we can all guess how this will turn out down south.

delichon 1y ago

It is voluntary. The two times I have been approached by census takers I declined to participate. They had no problem with that, everything stayed friendly, they thanked me and left. There was never a consequence. The last time, during the last census, the census worker asked me why. I asked her if she knew about census data being used to round up U.S. citizens with unpopular ancestry and put them into concentration camps. She didn't, so I told her a little about the Japanese internment when my father was a teenager, and that I too have unpopular ancestry, and would prefer not to be on their list. She was agreeable.

zamadatix 1y ago
In practice I don't think anyone has been charged for denying the census in many many years. In law, it's not actually voluntary and you're pretty much riding on the census takers not caring lately rather than any actual status of whether the census is voluntary. If unpopular ancestry were a target of the census data again then I'd bet the lack of caring from the census takers goes away too, and the law needn't change to support that. Regardless, this is actually about the ACS anyways.
- jerlam 1y ago
  I am not sure if "not caring" is the right perspective. The census takers have a very limited ability to compel you to answer and are not going to show up on your doorstep with law enforcement or threaten fines for not answering. People threatening or attacking census workers isn't uncommon. This article is from 2010 and due to increased political polarization, it would probably be worse today: https://www.npr.org/2010/06/21/127988332/census-workers-face-vitriol-and-violence https://www.npr.org/2010/06/21/127988332/census-workers-face...
  - xtiansimon 1y ago
    > “The census takers have a very limited ability to compel you to answer…” True. But it’s about the data, right? I worked the 2010 census in my town. Obviously there is the escalation from mail-in to visit. But I recall there was some additional level after a refusal. In other words they don’t just treat a non-responsive or hostile home as a vacant lot.

hermannj314 1y ago

The inital goal of counting every person for determining congressional appointments seems trivial in our modern surveillance state. I feel like we know this answer every minute of every day even without a census. I don't understand why it became a 70 question survey you are forced to answer. A core value of America is our right to obstruct any government attempt to improve our lives and I defend that stubborness.

jewayne 1y ago
> A core value of America is our right to obstruct any government attempt to improve our lives and I defend that stubborness. Nobody tell this guy about how the interstate highways got built. Or about how we eradicated a dozen diseases. Or how civilization works, in general.
- nicole_express 1y ago
  People fought interstate highway construction too. In some cases, they were right; people in the Boston area are generally pretty happy the pushback against the Inner Belt that would've demolished half of Cambridge was successful.
hodgehog11 1y ago
> A core value of America is our right to obstruct any government attempt to improve our lives and I defend that stubborness. I think this is a reinvention of history, because much of American history, and the writings of the founders, do not seem to imply this. The core value to my understanding is "no taxation without representation", probably followed by freedom of speech (from government). I don't think this is true anymore though, given how many people are happy for the king to impose taxes on them at will.

dimal 1y ago

Most people here are reading the headline and thinking that they’re pushing to make the census voluntary. The article actually says that they’re pushing to make the American Community Survey (ACS) voluntary. These are different things. According to the article, the ACS was started in 2006 and is conducted every year. I’m not defending what the Republicans are doing. I’m just clarifying it, so at least people can discuss what’s actually happening instead of having knee jerk reactions.

hodgehog11 1y ago
This is an important distinction, but I don't believe it negates the other discussion as far as the principle involved.
- kbelder 1y ago
  Well, the survey is constitutionally mandated, whereas the ACS is just a law, so they exist on two different levels of enforceability and responsibility. The government can't not do a census; it's not permitted. The ACS can have its rules revised with no problem.
stackskipton 1y ago
I’ve gotten ACS twice and refused both times over how intrusive it is. You can read the survey here: https://www2.census.gov/programs-surveys/acs/methodology/questionnaires/2025/quest25.pdf https://www2.census.gov/programs-surveys/acs/methodology/que... My biggest complaint about it is it’s used a ton by private sector so it’s basically government sponsored research for companies.
- lotsofpulp 1y ago
  Would you rather the data only be visible to well funded companies?
  - stackskipton 1y ago
    So we need this bailout to even the playing field?

hereme888 1y ago

Political clickbait title. Corrected title: "Republican bills would make the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey voluntary and bar enforcing mandatory responses to any census survey, citing privacy concerns and raising data-quality warnings."

sbuttgereit 1y ago
From the article... "Language in a pending 2026 spending bill written by the Republican-led U.S. House of Representatives goes further. It would make both the ACS and the regular 10-year census voluntary, and would also prohibit the agency from reaching out more than once to anyone who doesn’t initially respond." That text included a link to the bill: https://docs.house.gov/meetings/AP/AP00/20250910/118544/BILLS-119-FC-AP-FY2026-AP00-FY26CJSFullCommitteeMark.pdf https://docs.house.gov/meetings/AP/AP00/20250910/118544/BILL... From that bill I imagine they mean (page 146) "SEC. 605. None of the funds in this Act may be used to enforce involuntary compliance, or to inquire more than twice for voluntary compliance with any survey conducted by the Bureau of the Census."
- hereme888 1y ago
  You're right. Corrected my comment.

theturtle 1y ago

[dead]

0xbadcafebee 1y ago

Soon: "What poor/vulnerable people? There's none in the US, look at the census data! Clearly we don't need to do anything for them!" FTA: "The ACS, an offshoot of the decennial census, contains roughly 70 questions on housing, employment, education, health, military service, and other demographic details. Each question has been ordered by Congress or requested by an agency to carry out its mission. “But some of them are pretty invasive,” says a spokesperson for Steube, citing questions about when someone begins their daily commute to work and whether they have difficulty getting dressed." They're sensitive, not invasive. And the whole point is to find out if there are people with sensitive needs, so we can help them. The Republican party just doesn't like the idea of helping people. Anything that could improve people's lives gives them the willies.

robocat 1y ago

New Zealand has its very last census in 2023 and is having no more. https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/in-depth/564560/the-traditional-census-has-been-switched-off-what-happens-now https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/in-depth/564560/the-traditional-c... So maybe it has nothing to do with US politics and is just a worldwide trend?