Updated February 21, 2025 at 19:34 PM ET
After President Trump put out an executive order targeting gender identity, the U.S. Census Bureau stopped work on producing statistics that could help protect the rights of transgender people, the bureau's recently departed leader tells NPR.
The bureau, which is the federal government's largest statistical agency, has taken steps to remove gender identity questions from at least four separate surveys it conducts.
They include the National Crime Victimization Survey and the National Health Interview Survey, Robert Santos tells NPR in his first published interview since resigning last week. Brian Tsai, a spokesperson for the health survey's sponsoring agency, the National Center for Health Statistics, confirms in a statement to NPR that the change was made to comply with Trump's Executive Order 14168. The Times Union of Albany, N.Y., first reported on a directive that went out to one of the bureau's regional offices about the crime survey's change.
The bureau has asked for approval of a "non-substantive change" to the Household Trends and Outlook Pulse Survey that would delete questions related to gender identity, a regulatory document released this week shows. On forms for another survey — the Survey of Sexual Victimization, which tracks sexual abuse and harassment in correctional facilities as required by the Prison Rape Elimination Act — the bureau has taken out gender identity questions and replaced the word "gender" with "sex" in instructions that define "staff sexual harassment."
Santos says Trump's order has also led to the bureau reassessing research into adding questions about gender identity and sexual orientation to its own annual American Community Survey, a key source of demographic data on the country's population.
"That work, although it was funded by Congress, was suspended until there could be a clarification as to whether that should proceed or not," says Santos, an appointee of former President Joe Biden.
Toward the end of former President Barack Obama's administration, the Justice Department requested those questions for the American Community Survey, which the DOJ said could produce more comprehensive statistics about LGBTQ+ people to assist with enforcing federal laws such as the Violence Against Women Act, the Civil Rights Act and the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act.
But the first Trump administration stalled efforts to research how best to ask about a person's sexual orientation and gender identity, and during sworn testimony for a lawsuit, a Trump official at the time said the administration did not want questions on those topics to be included. After Biden was elected president, the Justice Department renewed its request for the questions, and Congress, under a bipartisan spending plan, approved $10 million to fund the bureau's research, which included plans for in-person interviews this spring.
The press offices for the bureau and the agency that sponsors the crime survey, the Bureau of Justice Statistics, have not responded to NPR's requests for comment.
Naomi Goldberg, executive director of the Movement Advancement Project, a think tank focused on LGBTQ+ rights and voting issues, points out it's unusual for questions to be removed from federal government surveys without opportunities for public feedback and justification based on research.
"We should all be worried about questions disappearing from surveys and what that means," Goldberg says. "If questions can be removed in this way, what about questions about disability, about race and ethnicity, about economic variables?"
The "heart-wrenching" process of following Trump's order
This confirmation of how Trump's executive order on gender identity has affected certain U.S. statistics comes after three weeks of silence from the Census Bureau on the public losing access to previously released datasets and research.
The temporary shutdown of parts of the bureau's website, Santos confirms, was the result of the Trump administration giving federal agencies a short turnaround time for reviewing webpages and removing any that included words related to gender identity.
The scramble, which began shortly after Santos announced his plan to resign late last month, was a "heart-wrenching" process, he adds.
"The Census Bureau staff fully embrace the principles of scientific integrity, objectivity, transparency and independence. Yet all federal employees, both appointees like me, as well as the career staff and the leadership, are obliged to follow the rule of law. Executive orders fall within the rule of law," Santos says.
The Trump administration is currently facing multiple lawsuits over Executive Order 14168, including one led by the National Urban League that challenges limits on federal data collection about gender identity.
"I did not want my resignation to be a protest"
Before he joined the bureau in 2022, Santos was an outspoken critic of how the first Trump administration interfered with the 2020 census. He says he decided last August — prior to last year's presidential election and "independent of any political consideration" — to cut short his five-year appointment as the agency's director.
"The decision was really based on the fact that my wife and I had been living apart by necessity, her in Texas and me in D.C.," he explains.
With key preparations underway for the 2030 national head count that will be used to redistribute political representation and federal funding to communities, Trump now has an early opportunity to name a successor for a role that Santos says he believes should remain "apolitical."
"Unless it was absolutely necessary, I did not want my resignation to be a protest, and I do not see it that way," Santos says. "I do see that we have very difficult times ahead of us and that there is a lot of education that needs to occur with the decisionmakers so that untoward, damaging types of events don't befall the federal statistical system, including the Census Bureau."
While Santos says the recent wave of mass firings of federal workers at other agencies is "causing a lot of suffering and angst" among the career civil servants at the bureau, the Trump administration's ongoing hiring freeze is "a lurking threat that folks have not recognized."
Restricting the bureau's ability to hire interviewers for surveys, Santos says, "could end up resulting in some key economic indicators either not coming out the way they normally do — unemployment rates, inflation, things of that sort — or being delayed."
Have information you want to share about changes at the Census Bureau or across the federal government? Hansi Lo Wang is available via the encrypted messaging app Signal (hansi.01).
Edited by Benjamin Swasey
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