October 15, 2026
LAWMAKERS ARE TRYING to get their arms around possible changes to the US Census that they fear could dramatically alter congressional representation and cause funding for federal assistance to be slashed.
The Massachusetts Senate Committee on the Census, which has been grappling with the looming 2030 decennial census, held a hearing Wednesday to examine proposed federal rules that would exclude non-citizens from the count and change the way residency is determined. The new residency requirements would count people based on where they are between January 3 and April 1, potentially decimating counts for university students and the “snowbird” population who spend the harsh winter months in warmer climes.
During the hearing, experts testified that these changes would hit Massachusetts with particular force.
The change, if implemented, would “dramatically and inaccurately favor southern states where many northern residents, sometimes called snowbirds, spend some or all of the months of December through March, despite spending a majority of their time voting in and paying taxes to northern states like Massachusetts,” Jessie Partride Guerrero, director of data services at the Metropolitan Area Planning Commission, testified.
The new rules, if enacted, would mean census counts could not include many international students, international workers, those with Temporary Protected Status because their home countries are considered unsafe to live in, refugees, asylum seekers, and more.
Some 1.3 million residents in the Bay State are foreign born — about a fifth of the state’s population, and over 641,000 of whom are noncitizens, said Susan Strate, senior program manager at the UMass Donahue Institute’s Population Estimates Program. That would be the rough equivalent of losing the entire city of Boston in the Census.
“It’s flabbergasting to think of the impact that this could have,” said Sen. Becca Rausch of Needham. “It is disastrous in so many ways. Maybe it’s not sloppy. Maybe it’s deliberate. Maybe it is a deliberate attempt by the Trump administration to force counts out of northern states and into southern states. It’s certainly not beyond the pale or beyond comprehension that that could be a goal here. It’s disgusting.”
The Census Bureau proposed these changes in September to the regulations governing the decennial census. Public comment on the regulations is open until November 2 — the day before the midterm elections.
“These proposals are intended to ensure fidelity to the Constitution, improve and protect the core decennial census data, and promote efficiency,” the Census Bureau said in its explanation of the rule. Based on its reading of Founding-era documents, the bureau said “illegal aliens (among others) should not be included in the apportionment count, as they are not true inhabitants, members of the body politic, or persons with a ‘usual residence’ in the United States due to their lack of a sufficient tie and allegiance to the United States.”
Strate testified that inaccurate Census count impacts will ripple out into inaccurate employment rates, inaccurate health care statistics, and federal dollars per person.
These counts are used to guide funding formulas for programs like the Community Development Block Grant program. Excluding non-citizens could mean a loss of $1.5 billion a year in federal funding, Strate said. The Census “is about data, money, and power,” she added.
The state could also lose congressional representation, Strate said. Massachusetts once had 10 seats in Congress, but lost one after the 2010 census. New York lost a seat by just 89 people after the 2020 Census.
These changes reflect a broader disruption in the US Census Bureau, said Beth Jarosz, a senior fellow at Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy. She estimated about 13 to 19 percent of staff had been lost since 2025, along with the elimination of scientific advisory committees, a year without staff attending conferences, and the termination of all data-user advisory groups.
In June 2026, the Department of Commerce issued an order banning modern privacy protection methods from any statistical product, cutting in half the tools the bureau uses to publish detailed data on specific communities. Jarosz said that order is now being used to justify removing race and ethnicity questions from the 2030 questionnaire — the argument being that, without modern privacy tools, granular demographic data can’t be safely published.
Race has appeared on every US Census since 1790, she said.
The privacy “proposal feels like it’s being used as pretext for removing demographic questions in the decennial census,” Jarosz told lawmakers.
Kristy Senatori, executive director of the Cape Cod Commission, described a stunning regional undercount risk: a combined undercount of more than 12 percent for Barnstable County if both the snowbird and non-citizen exclusions take effect.
Cape Cod could potentially see an undercount of approximately 10,500 individuals in total from the non-citizen change. The three month “enumeration period” between January and April also has the potential to result in an undercount of approximately 18,000 individuals, Senatori said.
“Along with the demographic changes, we’re also concerned about the utility of the data moving forward,” she said. “When parameters that have been collected for a very long time change, the data sets are no longer comparable. And if the census results in an undercount of our regional population … those effects will ripple throughout distribution of funds and services, certainly throughout regional and local planning and those services that we need to continue to provide to our residents throughout Cape Cod.”
Committee members and experts said they expect litigation to challenge the rule if it is ultimately adopted.
Committee chair Sen. William Brownsberger of Belmont said the proposal was “disastrous,” and though he said speculation was probably unwise, he is “almost certain the US Supreme Court won’t uphold this,” and he expects the attorney general’s office will get involved.
“I personally fear that the ramifications and the impact of these kinds of changes, assuming they go through, are going to be felt long before we get a decision from SCOTUS,” Rausch said.
Courtesy of Commonwealth Beacon
