Supreme Court orders halt to census

After weeks of back and forth, the process of counting the entire U.S. population will officially end. On Tuesday, the Supreme Court suspended a lower court’s order that required census takers to keep working until the end of October.

How did this get to the Supreme Court? After the coronavirus pandemic began, the Trump administration initially extended the deadline to finish the census to Oct. 31 but later tried to speed up the process. The Census Bureau said it would try to finish by Oct. 5, but U.S. District Judge Lucy Koh ordered the agency to keep going. Trump asked the Supreme Court to overturn the order so the agency could deliver the final numbers by the congressional deadline at the end of the year. That means the census-driven redistribution of federal funding and House seats will occur before any potential transfer of power after the Nov. 3 election.

Dig deeper: Read my report in Compassion about the effort to count the U.S. homeless population.