Trump officials propose sweeping changes to the census that would reshape voting maps

Demonstrators holding signs saying "EVERY PERSON COUNTS" rally outside the Supreme Court in 2019 in Washington, D.C., as the justices hear arguments over the first Trump administration's failed push to ask about U.S. citizenship status on the 2020 census. J. Scott Applewhite/AP hide caption

The Trump administration is proposing major changes to how the U.S. government produces census results for the next national head count in 2030.

While the plan faces likely legal challenges, such changes would affect the population numbers used to determine each state's share of representatives in Congress and votes in the Electoral College, redraw maps of voting districts for all levels of government and distribute federal funding for public services.

The administration's proposal , which was released online Wednesday, calls for an unprecedented exclusion of non-U.S. citizens without a green card from a key set of 2030 census results that the 14th Amendment says must include the "whole number of persons in each state."

Trump officials are also proposing to stop using the census to ask about people's race and ethnicity, a topic that the national tally has included since the first count in 1790 .

Many civil rights advocates, researchers and other supporters of the census race question warn the administration's plan puts at risk future federal data used for redistricting, enforcing the Voting Rights Act and other antidiscrimination protections and informing policymaking.

Another key part of the proposal would ban the U.S. census from including a question about people's sexual orientation.

While the government has not directly asked about that topic before on census forms, the 2020 count did ask couples living together to describe their partners as either "opposite-sex" or "same-sex." The first Trump administration blocked an earlier effort to add a sexual orientation question to the Census Bureau's American Community Survey, which the Justice Department under Democratic administrations has said is needed, alongside a gender identity question , to generate statistics that could help protect LGBTQ+ people from discrimination.