LGBT Tech Joins Coalition Letter Opposing Harmful Changes to the 2030 Decennial Census
LGBT Tech has signed onto a coalition letter led by the Movement Advancement Project (MAP), the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), and the Transgender Law Center (TLC), opposing proposed changes to the 2030 Decennial Census that would exclude noncitizens who are not lawful permanent residents, remove questions about race and ethnicity, and prohibit sexual orientation questions.
The Decennial Census is the statistical baseline that governments, researchers, and businesses use to understand who lives in the United States. It determines congressional representation, guides trillions of dollars in federal funding, and serves as a reference point for numerous public and private surveys. The letter urges the Census Bureau and Department of Commerce to:
Withdraw the proposed rule in its entirety and preserve the Bureau’s obligation to conduct a complete and accurate enumeration of all persons residing in the United States;
Retain race and ethnicity questions and implement the updated 2024 federal standards for the 2030 Census; and
Remove the prohibition on sexual orientation questions and continue collecting and publishing data on same-sex couple households.
For LGBT Tech, census data is critical to accurately measure digital equity and broadband connectivity. Policymakers and community organizations rely on census data to determine the effectiveness of broadband expansion policies. When LGBTQ+ people are not represented in the data, the digital divide becomes more difficult to document and close, particularly for rural communities, LGBTQ+ older adults, and people of color.
Additionally, market and product researchers at technology companies often use census data as a benchmark to ensure their samples reflect the actual population. Excluding LGBTQ+ people from the census would leave companies without a reliable way to ensure LGBTQ+ users are reflected in product research and design. The same is true for AI, where developers increasingly rely on census data to audit the fairness of their systems and measure representation in datasets. LGBTQ+ representation is essential to detecting and reducing bias in these datasets, which is critical as AI increasingly shapes access to jobs, healthcare, housing, and public services.
LGBT Tech will continue to advocate for LGBTQ+ people to be accurately represented in public datasets to allow policymakers, researchers, and the technology sector to have the data needed to expand digital equity and build tools that serve our community.
The full coalition letter can be found here.
