2026 The census test needs workers in the middle of preparation delays: NPR

The next American census should not be taken before 2030, but the federal government says that the aid is sought long before in six states for the main test on the field of the National Head Count.

The recruitment of door cutlery and other temporary workers for the “2026 census test” begins Monday in some parts of Alabama, Arizona, Colorado, North Carolina, South Carolina and Texas, the census office on its website announced.

The census test is supposed to help the office develop better ways to obtain complete and precise population counts and demographic data, in particular historically underestimated populations such as children under 5 years old, people of color and tenants.

Some people living outside the test sites can also receive invitations by post to participate from March 2026 as part of what the office calls a “sample of representative households at the national level”.

While the in progress federal closure stopped to work on new government statistics, the preparations for the tests continued because the managers of the Commerce Department supervising the Bureau judged it a “critical priority of the mission” before the constitutionally required count in 2030.

Last month, however, the office of the Inspector General of the Commerce Department caused the office to be able to recruit enough workers for the test. Uncertain funding for the Congress and Gel of Trump’s hiring led the office to resume the finalization of an endowment plan, revealed an audit of the Inspector General.

During a September audience on Capitol Hill, the Michigan Democratic Senator Gary Peters pointed out that hiring the office for the test is “behind the curve of what we have seen in the past”.

“The census office refused to offer me updates on the preparation status of this test,” added Peters, the best democrat supervising the office of the Senate Committee for Internal Security and Government.

The Office Public Information Office did not respond to requests for comments from the NPR.

The office’s announcement on Monday also comes after the agency made the rare decision to withdraw a public update on the test which was to be published in the Federal Register. The version from the opinion said since the office has planned to try to use American postal service messaging operators to conduct census interviews on two census test sites, while reducing its estimate of participants in tests by around 30% and reducing plans to count people in group quarters such as university dormitory dorms.

“The whole operation is very complex,” explains Allison Plyer, former office advisor, who now co -chairs the working group on strengthening the quality of the national conference on citizenship. “They must be able to test many of these procedures, and they did not obtain the budget increases they would need and they normally obtain at this stage of the 10 -year cycle. There is therefore a lot of concerns and also a lot of mystery. We simply do not see the kind of transparency on the way they will do this work that we have in the previous decades.”

Local officials of two of the six census test sites, which were announced last year, said they were also in the dark. The office had declared that efforts to raise awareness of test sites on the importance of participation “would begin last summer. But Lottie Barker, director of the county of Swain from North of the North of the West, and Curtis Evans, judge of the County of Jeff Davis of West Texas, said that no one of the agency had spoken to them or their personnel of the test last week.

“I hope it will be easy to recruit these temporary workers,” said Barker in an email, “but often this is difficult depending on the commitments that community members already have.”

Changes that the Trump administration has brought to the office in recent months – in particular the reduction of its permanent workforce and the installation of a new acting director without any obvious qualification for the role – also invokes questions about its ability to produce reliable statistics.

The official numbers of the 2030 census should be used to determine the share of each state of the seats of the congress and votes of electoral colleges during the next decade.

According to the 14th amendment, the “whole number of people in each state” must be included in the distribution of the census account. But Trump and an increasing number of republican legislators in Congress call for the exclusion of some or all non -American citizens living in the United States – an unprecedented change that, if it was made, would likely arouse new lawsuits.

Census data is also used to distribute federal funding for public services in local communities and redesign voting district cards for all levels of government across the country.