| | | | |  | | By Zach Montellaro | With help from Ella Creamer and Teresa Wiltz
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POLITICO illustration/Photo by AP | Happy Friday, Recast fam! Brakkton's on vacation, so I'll be doing the honors this week. And what a week it's been: Russia continues to pound Ukraine, there's chaos in the Florida Legislature and the Biden administration is seeking to reinstate the mask mandate for travel as Americans toss their masks in midflight. But today, we're talking all things Census. The last couple years have been a bear for all of us — and the federal government wasn't immune. But we're betting that few federal agencies had it as rough as the U.S. Census Bureau, the federal agency charged with collecting all sorts of data — from who lives here, to where we live, to how much we pay for our homes. The pandemic wreaked total havoc on the decadelong plans to conduct the 2020 census, which dictates everything from states' representation in Congress to the flow of billions of dollars in federal money. Covid-19 delayed the crucial field count by months, sending bureau officials racing to complete the count in time after the Trump administration pulled its own request to Congress to extend deadlines. Meanwhile, the bureau was battling constant political interference from then-President Donald Trump and his appointees. (For starters, he wanted to break with precedent and not count undocumented immigrants.) After a yearslong ( and ultimately losing) battle by the Trump administration to collect data on citizenship, it tried to rush out the census' final data before the end of his term, ultimately failing there, too. The push cost then-Census Bureau director Steven Dillingham his job — contributing to a months long delay in the release of apportionment and redistricting data and upending the political mapmaking process. All that left the Census Bureau with a badly damaged reputation, particularly among communities of color. Into that void steps Robert Santos, President Joe Biden's pick to lead the beleaguered agency. A career statistician, he's tasked with fixing the census after serving as a vice president at the Urban Institute. He's the first Latino to lead the agency, and the first person of color confirmed by the Senate to the position. He's got a tough job in front of him. I chatted with Santos about why he wasn't surprised by the undercount, why no census is perfect — and his push for more diversity at the agency. ◆◆◆ This interview has been edited for length and clarity. THE RECAST: Earlier this year, the Census Bureau said it likely undercounted Black, Latino and Native Americans . This has been a long-running concern with the decennial census, but it was particularly acute for the 2020 count. Any lessons that you learned? SANTOS: The American public should know that no census has ever been perfect, and there have always been populations and communities that are hard to count. The pandemic actually put this Census Bureau to the test, especially with hard-to-reach populations. And so the undercounts that resulted were not unexpected from my perspective. I commented on my concern prior to my nomination. And yes, we have seen undercounts that occurred. Now, while it's unrealistic to demand perfection, it's quite realistic to expect a high level of accuracy in a census. … We need data that are fit for their critical uses of apportionment and congressional districting. And based on everything that we did to assess the quality, we believe that we provided a 2020 census data product that absolutely fits that level of quality for those purposes. But yes, there were concerns with undercounted populations. And we did experience undercounts that were at levels that were higher than in 2010. WATCH: Director Santos Delivers Remarks About 2020 Census Quality Results
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| So we're taking a look at that. We're doing our due diligence. We are being transparent and making sure that folks understand the strengths of the data and that there are limitations. And we are using the lessons learned from the pandemic and our ability to be resilient as a bureau to adapt to those challenges to make plans for the 2030 census.
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| Every week, we sit down with diverse and influential characters who are shaking up politics. Who should we profile next? Let us know. Email us at therecast@politico.com.
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THE RECAST: How is all of this affecting planning for the 2030 census?
SANTOS: It's interesting because the day that the field operations stopped for 2020, planning began for the 2030 [census]. And it began in a couple of ways: One is that we absolutely need to do our due diligence, with the first-time-ever digitized field operations. We have an enormous amount of what we call paradata: data on field enumerators for the hard-to-reach households that track when they went, what happened, etc. And it's all digitized. So we're in the process of assessing that, to find the strengths and weaknesses in the operation, in really some of the most challenging times of the last century. We're in the process of doing a modernization and transformation effort with the Census Bureau to rethink this notion of a transactional "knocking on doors and having an interaction" with another entity, be it a human being or a business. Instead, [we're thinking about] having an enterprise that collects information, and then uses that information from existing sources — including possibly commercial sources — to then produce products that shed light on our people and our economy. THE RECAST: How do you get minority populations — that are often among the hardest to reach populations — to trust government data collection efforts better? SANTOS: There are no solid plans, because we need to do the research to establish what's an effective mechanism for doing that. So that's part of our planning that's currently occurring. But overarching to that is this notion that it's not enough for us to sit in a D.C. office and think harder to come up with solutions. It is absolutely necessary to get out and embrace our communities, to talk to people, to do community engagement and community-based participatory research. Where you start with the people in the community, and have them express their concerns, collect their concerns, their issues, what's going on with them, so that we can better understand how we can provide them with data as part of a transaction, so to speak, that will help their community.
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Then-Bureau director nominee Robert Santos testifying before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs committee, July 15, 2021, on Capitol Hill. | Jacquelyn Martin/AP Photo | | And if you do that by working with community organizations and stakeholders and partners, and local governments, you then create a tighter bond. Especially by doing so throughout the decade rather than just right before a census. So our plan is to do that level of engagement, to work with communities to show them demonstrably that there exists data that helps them in their neighborhoods, in their cities and their counties, in their rural areas. And I think by doing so and having this continuous relationship and strengthening those bonds, that that will build some level of trust. THE RECAST: You've had a recent focus on diversity at the bureau. How will that play out not only in staffing, but in data collection? Do you have plans for collecting more information? SANTOS: The notion is that you need to bring your whole self to the table. And it doesn't matter what race or ethnicity or whatever you are, you bring your values, your culture, your life experience as a statistician, as a scientist, as an administrator, as a person in contracts, or a computer programmer, or whatever. You do that in order to motivate new diverse perspectives and ideas. And you do it in a very respectful way that encourages critical thinking and innovation and creativity. So that you can have big ideas like "let's transform how we think about how data exists at the Census Bureau." …
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An envelope containing a 2020 census letter mailed to a U.S. resident in Detroit, Apr. 5, 2020. | Paul Sancya/AP Photo | And diversity, equity and inclusion is a way to frame, and it's a lens at which to look at, everyday operations, and rethink whether they're being done in a way that's creating the most accurate data, the most relevant data, and the most timely data. Those are three important elements of overall quality. It also involves a cultural change in how folks operate. So rather than saying we ask a question on a survey, and we've been asking that question for 30 or 40 years the same way, it may not be the best way to ask the question today, given how society has evolved and how we think differently. How we're embracing culture differently, how we're embracing our races and ethnicities differently, how we're valuing genealogy and ancestry, and we have DNA analyses and such. So to me that says we need to think about how we're going to alter or whether we should alter things like race and ethnicity and those types of concepts. And even though the Census Bureau can't do that by ourselves — we need to work with OMB, and OMB needs to set standards — we have the ability to do that type of research and ask those types of questions. So diversity, equity and inclusion is yet another really powerful way to create innovation, creativity and critical thinking, so that we can question the things we have to question, which is all of our operations, and think of new ways on how to do things. THE RECAST: There were a lot of concerns about political interference for the 2020 census — your predecessor left after reporting on it. Is there a way to better inoculate the bureau in the future? SANTOS: I'm actually pretty comforted now that I've come into the Census Bureau. We're a nonpartisan statistical agency. And we are absolutely fastidiously focused on our mission to produce quality data on our nation's people and the economy. And that means that we embrace scientific integrity and objectivity and don't worry ourselves with anything else. So I'm totally confident that we won't have to worry about that. We can operate in just about any environment.
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We're sending positive vibes for the weekend with some fun reading and viewing recs below. But first, some updates from the Florida House. On Thursday, Democrats sang and prayed on the House floor, protesting new congressional maps — stamped by Gov. Ron DeSantis and eventually passed by the Republican majority. Those maps will likely wind up reducing the number of Black representatives. POLITICO's Matt Dixon and Gary Fineout tell you more.
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Rep. Tray McCurdy (D-Orlando) and Rep. Angie Nixon (D-Jacksonville) sit on the Florida Seal in protest on April 21 in Tallahassee, Fla. | Phil Sears/AP Photo | The House also approved dual bills restricting The Walt Disney Co.'s privileges to self-govern the land surrounding its Central Florida theme park in the wake of the company's public opposition to the state's "Don't Say Gay" bill, reports Andrew Atterbury for POLITICO. In national news, President Joe Biden is standing firm on his decision to lift Title 42 next month in amid a party revolt. POLITICO's Laura Barrón-López, Christopher Cadelago and Eugene Daniels have the details on this. Now, to the dance world: Ashton Edwards is one of a growing number of nonbinary ballerinas donning pointe shoes and and busting ballet's traditional gender roles. Nyle DiMarco's new memoir "Deaf Utopia " throws light on Deaf culture and history, as well as what it's like to inhabit a world designed for hearing people. Writer-director Kate Tsang makes her debut with "Marvelous and the Black Hole," an angsty coming-of-age comedy with an Asian American protagonist.
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| Here's one for the nostalgic: The late, great playwright/poet/novelist Ntozake Shange's "for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf," which first premiered in 1976, returns to NYC's Booth Theater. Curren$y takes on NPR'S Tiny Desk (Home) Concert, paying homage to 4/20. (This might be just a little NSFW.)
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| Colombian artist Sebastián Yatra just dropped a fun technicolor video for Si Me La Haces, a reggaeton pop collaboration with Lenny Tavárez and Mariah Angeliq. Kay Flock takes Akon's 2004 hit Bananza (Belly Dancer) in a hyped-up new direction with a track featuring Cardi B, Dougie B and Bory300.
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| TikTok of the day: You can do it
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