Department of Commerce v. New York

The District Court found that adding the question was likely to reduce responses from noncitizen households, leading to an undercount. The Supreme Court held that this factual finding was not clearly erroneous for standing purposes.

Several States showed that an undercount of noncitizen households as small as 2 percent would reduce federal funding allocated by state population. That prospective financial injury was concrete and imminent, and a favorable judgment would redress it.

The causal chain did not rest on impermissible speculation about independent third parties. The anticipated reaction of noncitizens to a citizenship question was a predictable effect of government action, supported by historical response patterns and Census Bureau evidence, even if some households would fail to respond despite a legal duty to do so.

The Constitution gives Congress very broad authority to direct the manner of the decennial enumeration, and Congress delegated that authority to the Secretary. The Court's prior census cases require a reasonable relationship to an actual enumeration when reviewing decisions about counting people, but that standard did not govern the separate question of collecting demographic information.

A contrary rule would cast constitutional doubt on the many demographic questions included in censuses since the founding. Census questionnaires have long gathered information beyond a headcount, including age, sex, occupation, and citizenship.

Longstanding, open, and unchallenged historical practice confirmed the constitutional understanding. Citizenship questions appeared in censuses beginning in 1820, so the Clause did not itself bar the Secretary's decision.

The APA presumptively authorizes judicial review and excludes review only in the rare circumstance where a statute supplies no meaningful standard for judging agency action. The Census Act's broad delegation to determine census form and content did not erase all legal constraints.

Census administration is not a category of decision traditionally insulated from judicial review. Courts have long entertained constitutional and statutory challenges involving census decisionmaking.

The Census Act includes specific limits, including provisions concerning sampling, administrative records, reporting to Congress, and the duty to conduct an accurate population count. Those provisions, together with ordinary APA requirements of reasoned decisionmaking, provided law for a court to apply.

The Secretary considered the Bureau's alternatives: retaining the American Community Survey and improving its model, using administrative records alone, or combining administrative records with a citizenship question. He concluded that records alone left citizenship unknown for more than 10 percent of the population and that the combined approach would produce more complete data.

The evidence reflected genuine uncertainty and tradeoffs. Administrative records alone required the Bureau to estimate citizenship for roughly 35 million people, while the combined approach would require estimates for fewer people but would introduce possible response and self-reporting errors.

The arbitrary-and-capricious standard is deferential. The Secretary considered the relevant evidence, weighed the risk of a lower response rate against the perceived value of more complete citizenship data, and explained his choice. The plurality held that the District Court improperly substituted its policy judgment for the Secretary's.

Section 6(c) requires the Secretary, to the maximum extent possible and consistent with the kind, timeliness, quality, and scope of required statistics, to use available administrative information instead of direct inquiries. The Court noted that the provision may concern only statistics that the Census Act expressly requires the Secretary to collect, rather than citizenship data sought for this purpose.

Assuming the provision applied, the Secretary reasonably concluded that administrative records alone would not yield the complete and accurate citizenship data that DOJ requested. That conclusion meant records could not be used instead of direct inquiry consistently with the statutory standard.

Section 141(f) requires reports to Congress on proposed census subjects and questions and requires a further report when new circumstances necessitate modification. The Secretary's March 2018 report proposed the citizenship question and thereby notified Congress that he would modify the earlier list of subjects.

The Court saw no statutory bar to a single report satisfying both the two-year reporting requirement and the requirement to report a later modification. The Secretary's accompanying memorandum also explained that DOJ's intervening request prompted the change.

Even if the reporting sequence technically violated the statute, the APA's rule of prejudicial error prevented vacatur. Congress was fully informed of, and received an explanation for, the proposed citizenship question.

Ordinarily, APA review is limited to the contemporaneous administrative record, and a court should not invalidate action simply because an agency had additional unstated motives or political considerations. Extra-record inquiry into decisionmakers' mental processes requires a strong showing of bad faith or improper conduct.

The District Court ordered extra-record discovery prematurely; it should initially have required completion of the administrative record. But the subsequently completed record contained extensive evidence showing that the Secretary had pursued a citizenship question shortly after taking office, while the Voting Rights Act played little role in the early process. That evidence largely justified the discovery that occurred, although Secretary Ross himself was not deposed.

The full record showed that Commerce officials sought a willing agency to request citizenship data, initially approached agencies with no Voting Rights Act enforcement role, and eventually secured DOJ's request after the Secretary contacted the Attorney General. DOJ's letter was heavily shaped by Commerce, and DOJ declined the Bureau's offer to discuss alternative means of supplying citizenship data.

Taken together, these facts did not match the Secretary's account that Commerce was simply responding to a routine DOJ request for Voting Rights Act enforcement data. Because the Voting Rights Act rationale was the sole explanation offered and appeared contrived, accepting it would make judicial review an empty ritual. The Court affirmed the remand, while expressly declining to hold that the agency could never adopt the same substantive policy with a genuine, adequately explained basis.