John F. Early
The federal government collects and publishes extensive data that divide Americans by race. These data have been used to target racial groups and execute policies that discriminate among individual Americans, giving or denying benefits or preferences, and providing unequal treatment to them based on their race or ethnicity.
Erosion of American liberty through racial profiling was severe in the early days of the republic with slavery, but it was slowly mitigated with the abolition of slavery, the elimination of Jim Crow laws, and the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. At the same time, civil society has become far less intolerant across racial lines. Today, 20 percent of newly married couples cross racial lines in selecting a partner for the most intimate human relationship, with the interracial proportion reaching almost half for some races.
Unfortunately, the government has pushed racial profiling to differentiate and mistreat based on race while claiming to pursue diversity. A disturbing recent example of this perversity is the 2024 Office of Management and Budget (OMB) revision of “Statistical Policy Directive No. 15: Standards for Maintaining, Collecting, and Presenting Federal Data on Race and Ethnicity” (SPD 15), which directs federal agencies to expand data by race.
SPD 15 may seem to be merely statistical, but the harsh restraint on liberty is revealed by its requirements: “These standards must be used by all Federal agencies for civil rights and other compliance reporting from the public and private sectors and all levels of government.”
On day one of his second term, President Trump issued a promising executive order, “Ending Radical and Wasteful Government DEI Programs and Preferencing.” The next day, another order set more specific requirements to stop “demeaning and immoral race- and sex-based preferences under the guise of so-called ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion.’” It required all agency heads to develop “a plan of specific steps or measures to deter DEI programs” within 120 days.
Because race-based data collection and publication are enablers of those noxious initiatives in both government and the private sector, one would expect an immediate reversal of the 2024 expansion of race-based data and hope for a complete elimination of those unconstitutional and immoral data. The specific requirements for race-based data collection exist only through the administrative OMB SPD 15, so plans to reverse and eliminate them would be a straightforward administrative action.
Unfortunately, a year after the plans required by the executive order were due, there is no evidence of any plans to stop the expansion of race-based data. In fact, the “2030 Census Operational Plan” dated July 2025, six months after the executive orders, lists as its top demographic improvement: “Increasing the level of race and ethnicity detail for the estimates.”
On May 5, 2026, the official Census Bureau website reported, “The Census Bureau is preparing to implement OMB’s updated 2024 race and ethnicity standards in the 2027 American Community Survey and the 2030 Census.” Furthermore, as recently as April 29, 2026, the Census was using public funds to conduct free webinars to train people in the application of race data, as announced in the following email.
The link in this email has since been disabled, with an “Error 404: Page Not Found.” One cannot be certain whether this is merely sloppy housekeeping or a conscious effort to hide the activity after the conflict of this webinar with stated policy in the executive orders was pointed out.
Another webinar was announced to train organizations to use race data to qualify for grants. As with the previous webinar, the link to the relevant page has been disabled.
Fortunately, I had previously retrieved the material used in this webinar before the site was disabled. Here is page 14 from that material, which shows race and ethnicity as the third item in a list of eleven data elements available from the Census to help people win grants.
These announcements and webinars illustrate how the Census Bureau is still moving full speed to promote racial profiling to support disparate impact and DEI objectives. Strong executive action is required to stop and reverse this refusal to change.
Timing is critical. Any substantive changes to the 2030 Census must be submitted to Congress by April 1, 2027. The current plans implement more extensive racial profiling under the 2024 SPD 15, which, without quick intervention, would be included in that congressional submission. Stopping this tragedy requires only administrative changes, but they must go through the Administrative Procedures Act steps, which require significant time.
Although OMB and Census have not moved to fix SPD 15 and its implementation, bureaucrats are keeping track of the formalities. OMB has issued two revisions to the date by which implementation plans are required from agencies—first from September 29, 2025, to March 28, 2026, and then to March 28, 2027. When will leadership move to correct the substance?
During the public comment period before the 2024 expansion of SPD 15, the case against the expansion was well documented, including a detailed analysis of how it could harm newly designated races. Then, after the revised SPD 15 was promulgated, further analysis detailed its flaws and the actions needed to end it.
In addition to the flaws outlined above, these previous analyses have shown the following:
By their own admission, OMB and Census created races that are merely subjective responses from Census surveys, not scientific facts. Even these subjective responses are corrupted by Census edits that change the actual responses from residents when Census bureaucrats don’t like the answer, for example, forcing Brazilians into the residual “Some Other Race and/or Ethnicity” category despite the fact that 67 percent of them identify as Latino. The racial coding specifies 6,676 detailed racial categories. The racial distinctions are so extensive that the detailed classes within the American Indian and Alaska Native category have an average of only 678 people in each class. The definitions of races are inherently wrong. They are of the form: “[A race]. Individuals with origins in any of the original peoples of [a geographic area], including, for example, [some races].” With the possible exceptions of a very few remote tribes, we have no record and no idea of who the original people were for any piece of land on earth. For at least 200,000 years, Homo sapiens have moved across the globe, removing previous inhabitants from the land by expulsion, murder, enslavement, or absorption. One example illustrates the broad failures in the directive. OMB defines: “White. Individuals with origins in any of the original peoples of Europe, including, for example, English…” The first example is English, which is absurd. The word itself comes from the Angles, who, with the Saxons and Jutes, conquered the island of Britannia in the fifth century, following the withdrawal of Rome after its 500-year occupation of the Celtic Britons, who, in turn, were one of the Celtic tribes that had migrated there from Iberia, which is now Spain. So, are the “original” people of the island Britannia some conquerors from Espana and hence Hispanics? Or are the originals the Anatolian soldiers in the Roman army who left their genetic imprints on inhabitants of “English” villages even to this day? Certainly, they are not the English derivates of the Angles who didn’t invade before 450 BCE. How about the Vikings or Norsemen from the ninth century or the Norman French from 1066? Not to mention the Paleolithic hunter-gatherers who were driven from the island by the last ice age. Census also labels Turks as White, which by definition means they are the original people of Europe. But only 15 percent of Turkey’s population and 3 percent of its landmass are on the western (European) shore of the Bosporus. The 97 percent of Turkey that lies in Asia has a greater landmass than any European country. Reference books, the UN, and the Turkish government itself identify Turkey as primarily lying in Anatolia, Asia Minor, or Western Asia. Furthermore, Turks are not even close to being “original” people. They conquered and settled in eastern Anatolia only in the late eleventh century, coming from a part of Central Asia, an area now constituting Turkmenistan. For more than 300 years, they systematically annihilated, exiled, enslaved, or absorbed Greeks, Armenians, Kurds, and dozens of other ethnicities in Anatolia until they finally completed their conquest with the fall of Constantinople in 1453. And what about Spaniards? This definition makes them European and White. But OMB has snatched them from all other Europeans and made them “Hispanic or Latino.” Spanish is a European language of the Romance family. Creating a separate race of “Hispanic or Latino” makes no more sense than creating a separate race for “Anglophones” from Great Britain, the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, the Falkland Islands, and some others. Collecting data by race is also illegal, violating 13 US Code § 221(c): “Notwithstanding any other provision of this title, no person shall be compelled to disclose information relative to his religious beliefs or to membership in a religious body.” Responses to racial questions on the decennial census are compulsory, and some choices of race require disclosure of religious beliefs. For example, Serbs, Croats, and Bosniaks are each identified and coded differently in the Census racial classification. Yet, before the ninth century, the ancestors of all three were one undifferentiated people. They still speak the same language, and even native speakers typically cannot distinguish the different “native” tongues of their interlocutor from the broader population. A compulsory race question to someone from one of these ethnicities is equivalent to asking them to declare their religious affiliation or heritage, and is a clear violation of the law.These examples are only illustrative of fundamental flaws in the OMB/Census scheme of race classification. Combined with the constitutional and ethical failures, they constitute an overwhelming case to stop the madness and eliminate racial profiling in our statistics now.
Starting the administrative process immediately to correct SPD 15 can halt racial profiling and disparate impact analysis for the 2030 decennial census, as well as for the American Community Survey, the Current Population Survey, and other statistical systems that engage in racial profiling. Ideally, this administrative initiative should be followed by legislation to eliminate all government collection and publication of racial profiling data so that a later administration cannot easily reverse the progress. Even without legislative follow-up, this change can immediately eliminate the harm of racial profiling and disparate impact analysis at least for the present.
