Sponsors
The bill standardizes citizenship data and shifts apportionment to citizen-only counts, which benefits states seeking citizen-based representation but reduces representation, funding, and census accuracy for communities with large noncitizen populations.
State governments: would receive population counts limited to U.S. citizens for apportionment and state-level allocation decisions, enabling apportionment and resource planning based on citizen-only counts.
Department of Commerce and census operations: would collect citizenship explicitly via a direct checkbox on the census, standardizing and making citizenship data collection more explicit.
Immigrants and jurisdictions with large noncitizen populations: would be excluded from counts used for apportionment, reducing their political representation in Congress and at the state level.
States, localities, and residents in areas with many noncitizens: could receive less federal funding tied to population counts, potentially reducing services and shifting costs to local taxpayers.
Immigrants and noncitizen household members: may avoid responding or misreport citizenship on the census, lowering participation and making population data less accurate for planning and services.
Based on analysis of 2 sections of legislative text.
Requires the Census Bureau to count only U.S. citizens in all tabulations and to add a citizenship checkbox for every respondent and household member, effective on enactment.
Requires the Department of Commerce, through the Census Bureau, to conduct a population census that in all tabulations counts only U.S. citizens and to include a citizenship checkbox or similar option for every respondent and every household member. The change overrides other law and takes effect on the date of enactment. This shifts the unit the census reports from total population to citizen-only counts for all tabulations, which would affect how apportionment, redistricting, and many federal programs that rely on census data are calculated and could prompt legal challenges and operational changes at the Census Bureau.
Introduced August 5, 2025 by Randy Fine · Last progress August 5, 2025