A proposed federal rule could reshape who gets counted in North Carolina come 2030 — and with it, the state's political representation. Separately, census data informs access to billions in federal dollars and the quality of public data researchers and planners rely on every day. The Census Bureau's plan would count only U.S. citizens and legal permanent residents toward the population totals used for congressional apportionment, a break from the historical approach of counting all residents regardless of status.
A Formal Rule With a Short Comment Window
The proposal, published as a draft rule in the Federal Register on September 10, 2026, would add Parts 60 and 70 to Title 15 of the Code of Federal Regulations, according to the National Association of Counties. That marks a procedural shift from past decennial cycles, which relied on informal operational guidance rather than codified federal regulations. As WFAE 90.7 reports, the rules could change how race is tracked in the 2030 count, how the Census Bureau determines where people live, and ultimately how North Carolina's political representation and federal funding are calculated.
Under the draft rule, the Census Bureau plans to cross-reference federal agency administrative records, including tax documents, to identify noncitizens lacking lawful status and exclude them from congressional apportionment counts, the counties association's analysis notes. The rule also sets a public comment period of just 33 days, ending October 13, 2026 — a condensed timeline compared with the multi-year consultation process historically used to refine census residence guidelines. WFAE notes that members of the public can submit comments on the proposed rules through that same October 13 deadline.
Race and Ethnicity Questions Would Disappear
Beyond the citizenship provisions, the proposed rule would prohibit any questions regarding race, ethnicity, or sexual orientation on the decennial census questionnaire used for population enumeration, per the same NACo analysis. That change would eliminate a data source civil rights organizations and health policy researchers have long used to track demographic shifts and enforce voting rights protections.
The NC Counts Coalition held a virtual webinar to walk through the potential effects on North Carolina communities, according to WFAE. Nathan Dollar, director of Carolina Demography at UNC-Chapel Hill, told the outlet that the proposed rule “will fundamentally change the quality of the 2030 census count,” and warned that it “imperils the public's access to objective data more generally.” Census data helps communities plan public health services, schools and businesses, and it feeds directly into redistricting and the distribution of federal resources, WFAE reports.
Billions in Funding Riding on the Count
An analysis by the George Washington Institute of Public Policy found the state received $23.75 billion in fiscal year 2016 across 55 census-guided federal programs. Separately, North Carolina receives nearly $24 billion annually in census-derived federal funding. An older NC Child fact sheet puts census-data-dependent federal funding at $9.2 billion, more than half of the total it discusses. The Federal Medical Assistance Percentage (FMAP) formula applies to five programs, including Medicaid and the Children's Health Insurance Program, per NC Child.
State demographic data and Pew Research Center estimates indicate North Carolina is home to roughly 501,000 non-citizens, including about 325,000 unauthorized immigrants — making it the state with the eighth-largest unauthorized population in the country, according to the NC Office of State Budget and Management. The office estimates that 42% of the state's foreign-born population are naturalized U.S. citizens. Excluding those residents from apportionment totals could shrink the population figures used to determine both funding formulas and congressional seats.
Constitutional Fight Looms Over 'Persons' Versus 'Citizens'
Section 2 of the Fourteenth Amendment mandates that congressional seats be apportioned among states according to “the whole number of persons in each State,” a constitutional standard that has included all residents regardless of citizenship status since 1868, according to the American Indian Policy Institute. Legal scholars cited in that analysis argue the amendment's drafters deliberately chose the word “persons” rather than “citizens” to govern apportionment.
This isn't the first time an administration has tried to separate citizens from the apportionment count. In 2019, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Department of Commerce v. New York that the Commerce Department's rationale for adding a citizenship question to the 2020 Census was arbitrary and capricious, according to the U.S. Supreme Court record of the case. The following year, a presidential memorandum directed the exclusion of unauthorized immigrants from apportionment counts, but the effort lapsed without execution; the Supreme Court later dismissed the case, Trump v. New York, as premature because final counts hadn't yet been compiled, according to KGOU. The 2026 proposed rule represents a formal administrative attempt to revive that effort, this time with a codified regulatory mechanism for separating out noncitizens.
WFAE's coverage of the proposal comes from Julian Berger, a race and equity reporter at the station who focuses on Charlotte's Latino community and immigration policy. With the comment period closing October 13, the coming weeks mark the last formal window for North Carolina governments, advocacy groups and residents to weigh in before the rule could be finalized — and before any legal challenges under the Fourteenth Amendment or the Administrative Procedure Act would follow.
