House Committee Seeks Extensive Census Details

House Committee Seeks Extensive Census Details

To assist the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee in census oversight, Chairman James Comer (R-KY) has written to George Cook, the acting director of the Census Bureau, requesting details and documentation on operational issues and future safeguards by April 7, 2026. The Chairman’s requests cover a broad spectrum of concerns, including avoiding a repeat of errors and inaccuracies from the 2020 Census, improving the rural count, testing and planning, using direct responses instead of statistical estimation and imputation, and other issues, looking both forward and backward.

The requests laid out in the letter were for:

1. “All documents and communications related to methodological or other errors that contributed to state undercounts and overcounts in the 2020 Census, including but not limited to errors in enumerating group quarters populations and the use of differential privacy methodology, and an assessment of the extent to which those errors were associated with over and undercounts identified in the Bureau’s Post-Enumeration Survey for the 2020 Census”;
2. “All documents and communications detailing any other issues the Bureau identified to be associated with mistakes made during the 2020 Census, including but not limited to all documents and communications related to material differences in non-response follow-up operations from state to state, duplication issues other than those associated with group quarters, and longer deployments of enumerators in hard-to-count urban areas than in hard-to-count rural areas”;
3. “All documents and communications pertaining to protocols, procedures, mechanisms, tools, or methods for data collection, data processing, or other matters the Bureau plans to test or otherwise implement during the 2026 and 2028 Census Tests to help guarantee enumeration errors experienced during the 2020 Census will not be replicated during the 2030 Census”;
4. “All documents and communications pertaining to any Bureau projections before the 2020 Census estimating or otherwise discussing where overcounts or undercounts might occur during the 2020 Census, what steps, if any, the Bureau took to respond to any such projections, or the degree to which any such projections coincided with actual state overcounts and undercounts during the 2020 Census”;
5. “All documents and communications pertaining to measures the Bureau took to ensure its partner organizations remained politically neutral and unbiased in their work during the 2020 Census and measures the Bureau is now taking to ensure any and all partner organizations remain politically neutral and unbiased during any and all work they perform during the Bureau’s 2026 Census Test, other tests the Bureau performs before the 2030 Census, and the 2030 Census itself”;
6. “All documents and communications constituting or concerning reports, memos, analyses, or other evaluations prepared by the Bureau concerning the performance of enumerators during the 2020 Census, including but not limited to the Bureau’s quality assurance process post-enumeration”;
7. “All documents and communications pertaining to delays in pre-apportionment work in 2020 and 2021 and whether or how they allowed the Biden Administration to make enumeration alterations affecting the ultimate apportionment of congressional districts in 2021”; and
8. “All documents and communications detailing the extent to which the 2020 Census’ enumeration was based on direct contacts with individuals versus estimates and the bases for such estimates, including all documents within the scope of Director Santos’ aforementioned commitment to provide documents concerning such estimates.”

– House Oversight Committee letter (3/24/26)