Senior leaders of the Census Bureau shared a memo in September 2020 discussing the ways that Donald Trump’s administration had attempted to interfere with their agency’s data collection, calling the “direct engagement” by Trump’s deputies “unprecedented.” Throughout his presidency, Trump attempted to bend the census, taken every 10 years, to Republican advantage, including adding a question about citizenship documentation and ending the count early. Census Bureau leaders stressed the phrase “independent statistical agency” multiple times in the memo.
