A senior official in the Trump administration said Friday that the government is opening a review of the race and ethnicity classification changes adopted for the 2030 census and other federal surveys, raising the prospect that some of last year’s revisions could be rolled back.
Supporters of the 2024 updates caution that reversing or altering the standards could undermine the accuracy of census counts and other statistics used to redraw voting districts, enforce civil-rights laws and guide policymaking. Those revisions followed Census Bureau research and public input during the Biden administration.
The 2024 changes included a reworded prompt asking about respondents’ race and ethnicity and the addition of separate checkboxes for Middle Eastern or North African (MENA) and for Hispanic or Latino. The standards also directed agencies not to automatically classify people who identify as MENA as white.
Speaking at a meeting of the Council of Professional Associations on Federal Statistics in Washington, D.C., Mark Calabria, the White House Office of Management and Budget’s chief statistician, said the administration has begun reviewing how the 2024 standards were approved. He said the effort is in its early stages and that the administration has heard a range of views. “We’re still at the very beginning of a review,” he said, adding it would be premature to predict the outcome.
OMB did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Calabria’s remarks are the first public confirmation that officials are weighing whether to adopt the newest racial and ethnic categories and other technical revisions. The review is occurring alongside broader administration actions affecting diversity, equity and inclusion programs and questions about federal data collection on transgender people.
In September, OMB said the Biden-era revisions remained in effect when it announced a six-month extension to the 2029 deadline for federal agencies to adopt the new standards. Calabria said the extension is intended to give agencies more time to implement the changes while the review is underway.
Conservative critics successfully delayed changes ahead of the 2020 census, and the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 urged a new Republican administration to thoroughly review any alterations to race and ethnicity questions, saying some Biden-era proposals could skew data.
Advocates for the 2024 revisions say the changes better reflect how people identify and improve demographic understanding. Meeta Anand, senior director of census and data equity at the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, said the updates are aimed at producing a more accurate picture of the nation’s communities and warned against a review driven by a predetermined result rather than a fair assessment of the process.