After brazenly declaring on Twitter last week that his administration was “absolutely moving forward” with adding a citizenship question to the 2020 census—much to the surprise of his own Justice Department's lawyers—President Donald Trump has officially backed down from his census fight. The president announced Thursday that the White House is dropping its efforts to add the citizenship question to the census, which critics fear would have led to an undercount of approximately 6.5 million people and potentially affected congressional redistricting and federal fund allocation, likely to Democrats' detriment. Instead, Trump issued an executive order asking government agencies to provide citizenship data that's been gathered through other means. “We are not backing down on our effort to determine the citizenship status of the U.S. population,” Trump said. “I am hereby ordering every department and agency in the federal government to provide the Department of Commerce with all requested records regarding the number of citizens and non-citizens in our country.”

Trump said that federal agencies must “furnish all legally accessible records in their possession immediately,” which the administration will “utilize . . . to gain a full, complete, and accurate count of the noncitizen population.” The executive action ends the ongoing chaos over the question's future in the weeks since the Supreme Court ruled the question's inclusion unconstitutional—at least until the administration could give a better reason for adding it than the thinly-veiled racism currently being offered up. The president went rogue July 3 by declaring news reports saying the question would not be included in the census “FAKE!”—a move that DOJ lawyer Joshua Gardner said was “the first I had heard of the president’s position on this issue”—and sent the administration scrambling over the July Fourth weekend to find a way to include the question. The Trump administration had initially seemed resolved to cater to the president's whims by including the question however they could, but the president's Thursday announcement suggests that the White House has officially given up and brought the ongoing saga to an end. “The Department will promptly inform the courts that the Government will not include a citizenship question on the 2020 decennial census,” the Department of Justice said in a statement, bringing a sense of finality to the legal drama.

The administration insisted, naturally, that the decision to give up the fight was one borne out of timing more so than a willingness to admit defeat, as they believed they would not be able to wrap up the legal proceedings without the census getting delayed. “Put simply, the impediment was a logistical impediment, not a legal one,” Attorney General William Barr said. “We simply cannot complete the litigation in time to carry out the census.” Though the census question was brought to an end, the administration suggested that they may still use the government citizenship data for some of the purposes that citizenship question critics had feared, such as redrawing congressional districts based on the number of citizens, rather than both voting and non-voting residents. “Some states may want to draw state and local legislative districts based upon the voter eligible population,” Trump said. “With today’s order, we will conduct all of the information we need in order to conduct an accurate census and to make responsible decisions about public policy, voting rights, and representation in Congress.” (The American Civil Liberties Union has already said in a statement that they will “assess [the] legality” of any plans for using the citizenship data, potentially foreshadowing future legal battles.)

While the Trump camp tried hard to paint their retreat in noble terms and insist that Trump was taking decisive action through his executive order—“Congratulations again, Mr. President, on taking this effective action,” Barr told Trump during the news conference—Trump's action isn't actually at all revolutionary. Rather than presenting a bold new solution, the administration is instead just falling back on the method for gathering citizenship data that the Census Bureau's own researchers insisted on way back in January 2018. In a memo sent to Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, the government data method was pushed as being “comparatively far less costly” than the census question, and would not “increase response burden” or ”harm the quality of the census count.” Per CNN, while Ross shut down that solution as the primary method for acquiring citizenship data at the time, he still wanted to gather government data in tandem with the citizenship question. Because of that, while Trump may be asking agencies for their information now, in reality the Census Bureau has already been at work for months compiling a citizenship data file. Ross “hasn't issued any revision” to his instruction to compile government data, Census Bureau Chief Scientist John Abowd reportedly said at a meeting in May, “so we're operating under that instruction.” Abowd added that an “internal expert panel” had already been convened to lead that effort. “This news conference was total propaganda,” Vanita Gupta, the former head of the DOJ's civil rights division and the chief executive of the Leadership Conference, told the New York Times. “The government already has access to all of this citizenship data through administrative records, and already studies it. Trump just didn’t want to admit defeat.”