Census Bureau Director Robert Santos is resigning, making way for Trump's pick

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U.S. Census Bureau Director Robert Santos testifies during a House Oversight Committee hearing on the bureau in December 2024 on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C. Mariam Zuhaib/AP hide caption

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Mariam Zuhaib/AP

The director of the U.S. Census Bureau, Robert Santos, announced Thursday he is resigning, giving President Trump an early opportunity to nominate a new political appointee to lead the agency, NPR has confirmed.

Arturo Vargas, chair of the bureau's 2030 Census Advisory Committee, tells NPR that the committee's members received an email announcement, a copy of which NPR has reviewed. Santos and the bureau's public information office have not immediately responded to NPR's inquiries.

"In my retirement, I will be spending more time with my wife and family," Santos wrote in the email. "It has been and will always be the honor of a lifetime to have served as your director of the U.S. Census Bureau."

The decision by Santos, who started as the bureau's director in 2022, cuts short a five-year appointment during key preparations for the 2030 census. The next constitutionally required head count of the country's residents is set to be used to redistribute political representation and trillions in federal funding across the country over the next decade.

Demonstrators against the first Trump administration’s push for a census citizenship question gather outside the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, D.C., in 2019.

"It's always important for an agency as large as the Census Bureau to have stability in its most senior position, and we're at a critical point at the Census Bureau's preparations for the 2030 decennial census," says Vargas, who is also CEO for the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials. "I'll miss having somebody with the expertise and perspective that Santos has brought to the position as the bureau prepares for 2030."

Santos — a nationally recognized statistician who is the first Latino to head the bureau — joined the federal government's largest statistical agency as a Biden appointee after years of interference at the bureau by the first Trump administration.

Unstable funding for federal statistical agencies such as the Census Bureau and the Bureau of Economic Analysis, both based in Suitland, Md., is putting at risk the government statistics the U.S. uses to track changes in the country’s economy and population, officials and data users warn.

Before becoming the agency's director, Santos was a vocal opponent of how Trump officials handled the 2020 census — including a last-minute decision to end counting early during the COVID-19 pandemic and a failed push to add a question about U.S. citizenship status that was likely to deter many Latino and Asian American residents from participating in the official population tally.

During his three-year tenure, Santos made frequent outreach trips around the country in an attempt to rebuild public trust in the bureau's leadership. He helped oversee the creation of a new committee of outside advisers for the 2030 census, as well as planned changes to how the bureau produces statistics on race and ethnicity, a now-dropped, controversial proposal to transform data about people with disabilities and research into how surveys can ask about sexual orientation and gender identity.

Many census watchers are concerned about who Trump names to be the bureau's next director. The first director appointed by Trump, Steven Dillingham, stepped down in 2021 shortly after whistleblower complaints about an attempt to rush the release of an incomplete data report on non-U.S. citizens. Trump's first administration also created multiple new positions for political appointees who had no obvious qualifications for serving at the bureau's top ranks.