Updated January 30, 2025 at 20:33 PM ET
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.
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.
"It's been such an honor to serve our nation," Santos wrote Thursday in a sharing NPR's story after it was published. The bureau's public information office did not immediately respond to NPR's inquiries.
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 and across the country over the next decade.
"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, the advisory committee chair, who is also the 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 — joined the federal government's largest statistical agency as a Biden appointee after at the bureau by the first Trump administration.
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 during the COVID-19 pandemic and a failed that was likely to 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.
"It's important for all Americans to understand that the bureau collects data for their benefit, and I think the outreach he oversaw helped rebuild confidence and interest in the Census Bureau's work," says Terri Ann Lowenthal, a census consultant who was once the staff director of the former House oversight subcommittee for the national tally.
Santos 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 , a now-dropped, controversial proposal to transform and .
Many census watchers are concerned about who Trump names to be the bureau's next director. The first director appointed by Trump, Steven Dillingham, 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 who had no obvious qualifications for serving at the bureau's top ranks.
"Any attempt to fill the position with someone involved in partisan political activities will undermine public confidence not only in the bureau's work but the nation's statistics generally," Lowenthal says.
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