The Census Bureau Just Scrapped Its Race and Ethnicity Data Overhaul

On May 11, 2026, in a supplement to the Federal Register, the Census Bureau reversed a decision it had publicly committed to a month earlier. The 2027 American Community Survey, the bureau's largest annual survey and the source of most of the demographic data on this site, will not use the updated race and ethnicity standards the federal government adopted in 2024. It will revert to standards written in 1997. Talking Points Memo first reported the reversal.

The change reads as technical. It is not. The way the government asks about race and ethnicity decides how tens of millions of people get counted, and that count feeds redistricting, civil rights enforcement, and the distribution of federal money. Reverting to the 1997 framework leaves in place a set of measurement problems that the 2024 revision was written specifically to fix.

What the 2024 standard would have changed

The rules in question are called Statistical Policy Directive 15, the federal standard for how every agency collects and reports race and ethnicity. The Office of Management and Budget approved a major revision in March 2024, the first since 1997. According to the Federal Register notice, the revision did three significant things. It merged race and ethnicity into a single combined question that lets people pick more than one answer. It dropped the separate "Hispanic or Latino" question and folded that response into the combined one. And it added a Middle Eastern or North African category, distinct from White, where MENA respondents had been tabulated for decades.

Those were not cosmetic edits. Under the old two-question design, "some other race" has been one of the largest race responses in the country, because many Hispanic respondents did not see themselves in the listed categories and wrote in their own answer. The combined question was designed to cut that problem down and to count Hispanic and MENA populations more accurately. The Census Bureau, in its own April 2024 explainer, described the change as a long-overdue improvement built on years of testing. The official record of the revision sits at spd15revision.gov.

A reform that kept getting delayed

The 2024 standard was final, with agencies given until 2029 to comply. The Census Bureau was positioned to be early, planning to bring the combined question into the 2027 American Community Survey. Then the timeline slipped. According to Talking Points Memo, OMB pushed the bureau's implementation from September 2025 to March 2026, then to March 2027. As recently as April 2026, the bureau told TPM it remained committed to using the new standards for the 2027 survey. The May 11 Federal Register supplement reversed that, sending the 2027 ACS back to the 1997 rules.

Why it was scrapped

No public reason was given. OMB, now led by Russell Vought, and the Census Bureau declined to comment to TPM. The political context around the decision is not subtle. The Center for Renewing America, a group Vought founded, published a document on May 26, 2026 describing the 2024 standard as "state-sanctioned racism" and part of a "woke and weaponized agenda." Project 2025 had earlier called for the directive to undergo a "thorough review," arguing the data could be "skewed to bolster progressive political agendas."

The people who worked on the standard see it differently. Meeta Anand of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights called the reversal "moving away from accountability, and also just wasting resources and throwing away a whole notice and comment process and years of research." Denice Ross, a former U.S. chief data scientist, said the 2024 guidelines came out of a "solid methodological process" that would "survive any review." Marina Jenkins of the National Redistricting Foundation tied the timing to redistricting fights, saying it "is not a coincidence that this delay is happening at a time when Republicans across the country are working overtime to pass gerrymanders." Those are competing characterizations, and readers can weigh them. The factual core is narrower: a tested change that agencies had already adopted will not be used in the next ACS.

What staying on the 1997 standard means for the numbers

The decision keeps three things in place. Race and Hispanic origin remain two separate questions. MENA respondents continue to be counted within the White category, so there is still no federal number for how many Middle Eastern and North African Americans there are. And "some other race" stays large, which keeps a layer of noise in the single most-used race statistic in the country. Talking Points Memo reports the reversal also covers the Puerto Rico Community Survey and could extend to the 2030 decennial census.

The downstream effects are concrete. Redistricting and Voting Rights Act analysis depend on accurate counts of voters by race, and less precise data makes discriminatory maps harder to detect. Program administrators use race and ethnicity data to find gaps, such as the lower-than-expected SNAP enrollment among Black and Latino households that current data already shows. City planners use the same numbers to distribute transit and services. None of that work gets easier on the older standard.

What this means for the data on CensusEasy

CensusEasy reports American Community Survey race and Hispanic-origin data exactly as the Census Bureau collects it. So our race breakdowns on every place page, the most diverse cities rankings, and a post like which race is increasing the most all reflect the 1997 two-question framework. This decision means they will keep reflecting it through the 2027 survey rather than switching to the combined question. The detailed origin data we publish, like Mexican, Chinese, and Irish populations, comes from separate detailed-ancestry questions and is not affected by this change. You can see how those are built on our methodology page, and read the geography of specific groups in rankings like the largest Mexican-origin populations and the largest Chinese populations.

If the standard changes again, and the long delay history suggests nothing here is settled, we will update our data and this post. For a plain-English primer on what the census is and how it counts people, see what does census mean, and you can always compare the current race and origin numbers for any two places with the compare tool.

Sources

Reporting on the reversal: Talking Points Memo, "Census Bureau Quietly Scraps Plan For Improved Data Collection On Race And Ethnicity" (June 26, 2026). The 2024 standard: the Federal Register revision to OMB Statistical Policy Directive No. 15, the U.S. Census Bureau's April 2024 explainer, and the official SPD 15 revision record. Underlying demographic figures come from the U.S. Census Bureau American Community Survey.