The US Department of Commerce is circulating a proposed rule that would stop collecting demographic information on racial minorities and LGBTQ+ individuals and exclude undocumented immigrants from the 2030 census count, according to documents reviewed by WIRED. The change could reshape federal funding distribution, especially in states with large populations of racial and ethnic minorities, and affect immigrant communities nationwide. The proposal is currently making its way through government agencies for review.

The draft rule states the census will drop questions about race and sexual orientation "to protect from any distortions created from the inclusion of personal questions." The memo declares that "illegal aliens (among others) should not be included in the apportionment count, they are not true inhabitants, members of the body politics [sic], or persons with 'usual residence' in the United States." Implementing this exclusion would likely mean reintroducing a census question about citizenship status. During Trump's first term, Republicans tried to add such a question for the first time since 1950, but the Supreme Court rejected the effort in a 5-4 decision, with Chief Justice John Roberts ruling the justification was "contrived"—though the Court didn't find citizenship questions inherently unconstitutional.

Danah Boyd, a Cornell University professor who studies the census, explains the proposal targets the Voting Rights Act, the landmark voter protection law the Supreme Court dismantled earlier this year. Dropping the collection of this information would make basic assessments impossible, she says, such as determining whether a congressional district is primarily composed of minorities. "If we don't know certain things, we can't challenge them politically," Boyd states. "If we don't know that certain peoples live in a particular geography, we can't say, 'Oh my gosh, here's some massive inequality.'" An anonymous Department of Health and Human Services employee tells WIRED that many HHS programs rely on census data to allocate funding, and removing undocumented individuals will cause areas with high numbers of these populations to lose critical federal dollars. The employee adds that eliminating racial categories could specifically harm Native populations, which sometimes receive specialized funding, noting that "some programs use the 'American Indian or Alaska Native' category from the Census to make determinations of grants set aside for Tribal entities."

Census questions are determined two to three years before the actual survey, based on priorities the administration sets. The data shapes everything from how congressional seats are distributed to federal funding allocated by population size. Republican representative August Pfluger sponsored legislation called the COUNT Act in August 2025 to reintroduce a citizenship question, while Republican senator Jim Banks of Indiana wrote to Commerce secretary Howard Lutnick in October arguing that "there is a credible argument that the framers of the Constitution designed the Census to cover lawful inhabitants and not those who are present illegally." Trump administration officials have also recently attacked "differential privacy," a statistical method that prevents census data from revealing individual respondents' identities, claiming it produces inaccurate results. The proposal represents the latest Republican effort to fundamentally reshape how America counts its population, with consequences rippling through political representation and public funding for years to come. Constituencies that lose visibility in official counts may find themselves fighting for resources and representation without the data to prove their needs exist.