April 15, 2021: On Tuesday, President Joe Biden announced that he would nominate Robert Santos for the Census Bureau Director. If confirmed, Santos would become the first person of color to hold the position.

Santos would head the agency responsible for surveying the population every ten years to determine the distribution of funding to states and their political representation. He is an expert in survey sampling, survey design, and social science research, with above the experience of 40 years, the White House said.

Biden’s recent pick continues on his campaign pledge to create a diverse administration, looking like America,” Biden says. Santos, at present, serves as vice president of the Statistics Methods Group at the Urban Institute, a Washington, DC, nonprofit research organization.

He had been a critic of the bureau in that role, co-authoring a report of 2019 and warns that the Census of 2020 could gravely undercount minorities.

During the Trump administration, the Census Bureau became a political football when former President Donald Trump and his allies pushed to exclude undocumented immigrants from the count.

Trump’s Census Bureau Director, Steven Dillingham, resigned in January between the accusations of politicizing the agency that is some of the Commerce Department.

The U.S. Census results of 2020 have been delayed because of the challenges around the coronavirus pandemic and ongoing litigation. , it now expects to complete the count on April 30, 2021, and “deliver redistricting data to all the states by September 30, 2021.”