Facing criticism over efforts to produce citizenship data to comply with an order from President Donald Trump, U.S. Census Bureau director Steven Dillingham said Monday that he planned to resign with the change in presidential administrations.
Dillingham said in a statement that he would resign Wednesday, the day Trump leaves the White House and President-elect Joseph Biden takes office. His term was supposed to be finished at the end of the year.
The Census Bureau director’s departure comes as the statistical agency is crunching the numbers for the 2020 census, which will be used to determine how many congressional seats and Electoral College votes each state gets, as well as the distribution of $1.5 trillion in federal spending each year.
In his statement, Dillingham said he had been considering retiring earlier, but he had been persuaded at the time to stick around.
“But I must do now what I think is best,” Dillingham, 68, said. “Let me make it clear that under other circumstances I would be honored to serve President-Elect Biden just as I served the past five presidents.”
A Census Bureau spokesman said the agency’s chief operating officer, Ron Jarmin, will assume the director’s duties. Jarmin served in the same role before Dillingham became director two years ago.
Last week, lawmakers called on Dillingham to resign after a watchdog agency said he had set a deadline that pressured statisticians to produce a report on the number of people in the U.S. illegally.
A report by the Office of Inspector General last week said bureau workers were under significant pressure from two Trump political appointees to figure out who is in the U.S. illegally using federal and state administrative records, and Dillingham had set a Friday deadline for bureau statisticians to provide him a technical report on the effort.
One whistleblower told the Office of Inspector General that the work was “statistically indefensible.”
After the release of the inspector general’s report, leaders of the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials, Asian Americans Advancing Justice and The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights called for Dillingham’s resignation, and several Democratic lawmakers followed suit.
Dillingham then ordered an indefinite halt to the efforts to produce data showing the citizenship status of every U.S. resident through administrative records.
During Dillingham’s tenure, the Trump administration tried to put a citizenship question on the 2020 census questionnaire, and Trump issued two directives that advocacy groups said were part of efforts to suppress the participation of minorities and immigrants in the head count of U.S. residents.
