The Democratic congressman who oversees funding for the Census Bureau said on Tuesday that he will block Trump from wasting millions of dollars to reprint the 2020 census survey in order to rig it for Republicans.
Trump lost a Supreme Court case challenging his attempt to insert a question about citizenship into the census, which would undercount millions of black and Latino residents and unduly benefit the Republican Party. Despite the ruling — and even though the printing process on the census forms has already begun — Trump has continued pushing for the question to be included.
“It seems like the Trump Administration will stop at nothing in its efforts to undermine the completion of a fair and accurate 2020 Census,” Rep. José E. Serrano (D-NY) said in a statement.
Serrano is the chairman of the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies, which has control over the funds for the census-printing process.
“Because printing of the Census form without the citizenship question has now started, amending the form could potentially cost hundreds of millions of additional taxpayer dollars, in addition to untold millions of dollars for additional non-response follow-up resources next year,” Serrano noted.
“I have no intention of allowing this flagrant waste of money,” he concluded.
The federal government has already set up the process to print the survey, awarding a contract for $114 million to R.R. Donnelley & Sons in January.
Following Trump’s orders would mean wasting millions of tax dollars just to get a less accurate, racially biased census.
Trump’s attempt to defy the Supreme Court has led to turmoil at the Department of Justice. The DOJ replaced the entire legal team working on the census case, likely because career attorneys weren’t willing to go along with Trump’s nonsensical push to get around the high court ruling.
Trump can refuse to admit that he’s lost, but that doesn’t mean he’ll ever get his way.
Published with permission of The American Independent.
IMAGE: Rep. José E. Serrano (D-NY), chair of the House Appropriations Committee’s subcommittee on Commerce, Justice, Science and Related Agencies.
