The proposal would also remove race and ethnicity questions, which the census has asked in various forms since the first count in 1790. The administration argued these changes would better align with the constitutional mandate to count individuals based on their “usual residence.”
If approved, the proposal is expected to face legal challenges. But some experts are concerned that the debate itself could make it harder to get an accurate count. The once-per-decade survey determines everything from how many U.S. House seats each state gets to federal funding for local communities.
Matt Barreto is a professor at UCLA and director of the university’s voting rights project. He worked on research that was part of the legal fight over a citizenship question proposed by the first Trump administration for the 2020 census.
The question would have asked every person in the country whether they are a U.S. citizen.
Barreto found that requiring people to answer a citizenship question led to a major drop-off in responses among Latino and immigrant households.
“People are not going to want to fill out a government form telling the government where they live and the names of household members who are not U.S. citizens while you have a president who is actively running a massive deportation regime,” he said.
And Barreto said his team still noticed a drop off even after a federal judge in 2019 blocked the question from appearing on the 2020 Census because some mixed-status households still left people off their census responses out of fear.
“They didn’t want to put down a name of someone who may not have status, and what that does is it harms the count,” he said. “It means that we’re not actually getting a true count. We already saw some of that evidence in 2020.
“Had the citizenship question been on there, it would have been massively worse. California would have lost at least two if not three congressional districts back in 2020 and more federal funding.”
Barreto is referring to California's representation in the U.S. House. The state lost a seat for the first time after the 2020 Census, dropping its total from 53 to 52.
The Trump administration’s current proposal goes beyond asking people about their citizenship. Barreto said the administration wants to use government databases to identify noncitizens and undocumented immigrants and remove them from the population count.
The proposal is also reviving a fight California already had with the first Trump administration over the census.
Xavier Becerra was California’s attorney general during the fight over the 2020 citizenship question. He told CapRadio earlier this month the current proposal is part of the same broader strategy to exclude people from the count.
“It’s the same Trump strategy,” Becerra said. “He’s trying to exclude people from the count [and] he knows he’s in violation of the Constitution. We proved it the first time.”
Becerra is now the Democratic candidate for governor. If elected, he said he would challenge the administration’s proposal.
“If Donald Trump tries to do these things while I’m governor, he’s going to find that he’s going to see some of the same results he saw when I was Attorney General,” he said.
If approved, those exclusions could have serious consequences for states like California, where population growth has slowed nearly to a halt.
Republican gubernatorial candidate Steve Hilton did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Hilton in 2019 defended Trump’s effort to add the citizenship question to the census, saying: "Surely it's reasonable to ask people if they are citizens," according to a Scripps News article.
Congressional representation
Eric McGhee is a senior fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California who studies California’s population and political representation.
McGhee said the state has been losing residents to other states while immigration has historically been an important source of population growth.
“If something like this happens and we don’t count a lot of immigrants in the census, then the consequences would be disproportionate for a state like California, which has a lot of immigrants,” he said. “We have the largest immigrant population in the country in both raw count and percentage terms.”
McGhee said California could lose more House seats in 2030 with the exact number depending on how its population compares with other states. He said excluding certain immigrants from the count could make that even likelier.
Federal funding
A state’s population helps determine its federal funding.
Laura Pryor, a research director at the California Budget and Policy Center, specializes in education. She said she’s concerned about what getting the count wrong could mean for childcare programs, which rely heavily on federal money.
“In recent years, we saw the number of young children decrease in California just for population reasons and that actually resulted in a reduction of about $75 million in 2025-26 to our California’s childcare programs,” she said.
Pryor noted the state, at one point last year, proposed cutting nearly 7,000 childcare spaces from its budget in response to those declining numbers.
“Fortunately, the state was able to move some funding around to not have to result in those cuts, but what that means is if we have an undercount in future years, we’re going to see even more reductions coming in for programs like childcare that could result in real cuts to these spaces that we know California’s families need for affordable childcare,” she said.
Pryor predicted health care, transportation and labor and workforce development programs could all face similar cuts if California loses federal funding.