The revelation signals that Joel Greenberg, a Gaetz political ally, could potentially serve as a witness in the Justice Department’s investigation into the Florida congressman.
Picking up the pieces of a long, fractious process that spooled out during a global pandemic starts with transparency about irregularities in the data, officials say.
The Census Bureau’s director indefinitely halted an effort to gather data on the citizenship status of every U.S. resident.
The texts are the latest evidence suggesting census accuracy was sacrificed for speed as census takers and supervisors rushed to complete a head count last month.
Census workers said they were told by supervisors to enter fake answers on the head-count forms in order to close cases in the waning days of the census.
A coalition of local governments and civil rights groups had sued the Trump administration, arguing that minorities and others in hard-to-count communities would be missed if the count ended early.
The company says it has been squeezed by limits on attendance at its parks and other restrictions due to the pandemic.
Every resident of a state is traditionally counted during apportionment, but Trump last week issued a directive seeking to bar people in the U.S. illegally from being included in the headcount as congressional districts are redrawn.
The Constitution requires all people in the U.S. to be counted, and the move drew immediate criticism and promises of court challenges.
Census workers will be relying on smartphones and a new mobile app to relay answers to the government database.
The U.S. is expected to grow by almost a quarter in the next four decades, from about 332 million people today to 404 million people by 2060.
The past year’s population growth rate in the United States was the slowest in a century due to declining births, increasing deaths and the slowdown of international migration.
