Robert Santos, who emphasized inclusivity and outreach to overlooked communities, has decided to resign as director of the U.S. Census Bureau, midway through his five-year term and in the midst of planning for the 2030 census, which will determine political power and federal funding nationwide for another decade to come.

Santos, who was appointed by former Democratic President Joe Biden, said in a letter Thursday evening that he had made the decision “after deep reflection.” Santos was sworn in as the bureau’s 26th director, and its first Hispanic leader, in 2022.

His planned departure clears the way for Republican President Donald Trump to reshape the agency’s leadership as his allies in Congress and among GOP state attorneys general renew efforts to exclude people in the U.S. illegally from the numbers used to divvy up congressional seats and Electoral College votes among states.

A Republican redistricting expert wrote that using citizen voting-age population instead of the total population for the purpose of redrawing congressional and legislative districts could be advantageous to Republicans and non-Hispanic whites. The census numbers also guide the distribution of $2.8 trillion in federal dollars to the states for roads, health care and other programs.

Civil rights groups on Friday urged Trump to appoint an impartial leader to head the nation’s largest statistical agency.

“The integrity of the U.S. Census Bureau must remain above partisan influence, ensuring that data collection and reporting continue to serve the American people with accuracy, transparency, and fairness,” The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights said in a statement.

During his term, Santos emphasized restoring trust to the Census Bureau following Trump’s first term. Many census-watchers felt Trump’s administration tried to politicize the 2020 census by installing large numbers of political appointees at the agency and through failed efforts to keep people in the U.S. illegally from being counted for apportionment.

The Fourteenth Amendment says that “the whole number of persons in each state” should be counted for the numbers used for apportionment.

Before joining the Census Bureau, Santos was a vice president and chief methodologist at the Urban Institute and had spent four decades in survey research, statistical design and analysis and executive-level management. The Texas native said in his letter that he planned to spend time with his family in retirement.

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The story has been corrected to show that Robert Santos has decided to resign as director of the U.S. Census Bureau instead of has resigned from the agency.

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Follow Mike Schneider on the social platform X: @MikeSchneiderAP.

Mike Schneider, The Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — As the Democratic National Committee prepares to elect a new chair, its departing leader says Democrats should have stuck with Joe Biden in the 2024 race.

In an interview with The Associated Press, Jaime Harrison reflected on why his party lost to Donald Trump and what might have happened had then-Vice President Kamala Harris had more time to campaign after Biden ended his reelection bid following a disastrous debate performance.

He also offered advice to his eventual successor, who will be chosen Saturday. The next DNC chair, Harrison said, needs to insist that the party not be a “rubber stamp” to its presidential candidate.

Here are excerpts from that conversation:

Why did Harris and Democrats lose the White House?

HARRISON: “I don’t know that there’s one answer. A lot of people like to come up with things, and they say it’s the economy. Well, it could have been a part of it. I think every state had their own little nuance. In Michigan, the Palestinian issue played something there.”

“The gap in which she lost wasn’t huge, but when you add up little pockets where it’s, some people because of Gaza, some people because of the economy, some people because she was a woman. And I think in many of those states, those little nicks here and there added up to how she lost in some of those states.”

Did Harris’ shortened campaign timeline hurt her chances?

HARRISON: “Had she had more runway, it would have been probably easier for her and for the campaign. We were building a race for Joe Biden.”

“Joe Biden gave the State of the Union, people said it was one of the best State of the Unions that we’ve ever seen. Then we move forward to the debate, and people were like, that was a horrible debate performance. And then my thought was: ‘Joe Biden secured the nomination. The primary was done, and so, I’m a loyal guy. We’re riding with Biden.’”

“And if you look at the other side, in terms of Republicans, Donald Trump had just been convicted, how many times for all these felonies? And you didn’t hear a peep from the Republicans, in terms of like, ‘We need to jettison Donald Trump, and we need to open up a new primary, and we need to do this and that.’ And so sometimes, I think, Democrats can learn something in terms of, let’s put a line of defense around our folks and defend them as well.”

Should Democrats have stuck with Biden?

HARRISON: “That’s my normal default, is that you stick by your people, right, particularly people who have worked hard on behalf of the party.”

“I went into this thinking, OK, you’ve got probably the most successful of my lifetime legislative president who has poured tons of money into making sure that not just Joe Biden and Kamala Harris get elected, but Democrats get elected — not just in the battleground states, but all states who support a lot of resources and his own time fundraising in order to strengthen the state parties.”

“And then when he hits a roadblock, when he hits a bump in the road, do we stick with him, or do we jettison him? That’s the mentality that I had going into this. And my nature is, ‘I’m on the team with you, you’re my quarterback. You got sacked a few times. But you know what? I’m going to block the hell out of the next person that’s coming at you.’ And that is not always the mentality of everybody in my party. And so sometimes, people look on the sidelines, ready to call in the backup.”

Was the party prepped for a possible candidate switch?

HARRISON: “I had a very small group to whom I basically said, just game out for me what happens … if I have to do something, because people were asking for a big primary and this and that — and again, we have a short time frame, and so basically it was going back to the rules.”

“I didn’t even talk to all of the people in my inner circle. There were two staffers … just in case anything happened, I wanted to make sure that I knew what we could do. And so we had some structure for what something would look like.”

Did Harris act quickly enough to start acquiring support?

HARRISON: “She was literally on it. I wanted to get a sense of whether or not we were going to have a lot of people who were going to throw their hats in the ring.”

“And so I started making phone calls just asking, ‘I’m sure you’ve heard the news about the president,’ and to a person, they’re saying, ‘I just got off the phone with the vice president, and I’m pledging my support.’ I must have been chasing her calls, because literally, I’m calling, and everyone said, ‘Well, I’m supporting her.’”

What changes does the DNC need to make?

HARRISON: “The DNC shouldn’t just be a rubber stamp to whatever the campaign wants.”

“You don’t always have a seat at the table, in terms of, you take all of the arrows and the responsibility. People want to give you all the blame, but you don’t have the power to make those decisions, and I really think there needs to be reapportionment of a better, a greater balance.”

“I did not always have a seat at the table, was not always invited in the room. And I just think that is inherently problematic because of the perspectives that you bring.”

Do Democrats need to work harder with nonwhite voters?

Trump gained larger shares of Black and Latino voters than he did in 2020, when he lost those groups to Biden, according to AP VoteCast, a nationwide survey of more than 120,000 voters.

HARRISON: “People think, well, it’s just about turnout in the Black community, right? It’s just about turnout with this group. No, it’s not. It’s more than just turnout. It’s about persuasion. You have to persuade people why you are the best person for them. You have to talk to them about the issues that are important to them. You have to show them that you really are fighting for them, and that means having those individual conversations, but having targeted conversations specifically geared towards the people that you’re talking to.”

“You cannot take anybody for granted. You cannot just assume just because you’re a Black man, you’re gonna vote for a Democrat.”

How has the DNC changed under your leadership?

Harrison, who lost his 2020 Senate campaign against South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham but broke fundraising records during his run, said he has no immediate political plans. He didn’t close the door on another campaign. He has long been mentioned as a possible future contender for the seat held for decades by his mentor, Rep. Jim Clyburn of South Carolina.

HARRISON: “I’m proud of what we started here at the DNC. I created a red-state fund, where we’re pouring more money into those red states to help them rebuild the infrastructure. But there’s a lot more that has to be done.”

“I’ve been thinking to myself, wouldn’t it be appropriate for another southerner, another South Carolinian, a former DNC chair, to figure out how to re-establish the Democratic Party back in the South? And so I think I’m going to spend my time doing that.”

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Kinnard can be reached at http://x.com/MegKinnardAP.

Meg Kinnard, The Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — The man who hopes to be President Donald Trump’s health secretary repeatedly asked to see “data” or “science” showing vaccines are safe – but when an influential Republican senator did so, he dismissed it.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. spent two days this week insisting to senators that he’s not anti-vaccine. He said that he instead supports vaccinations and will follow the science in overseeing the $1.7 trillion Department of Health and Human Services, which, among other duties, oversees vaccine research, approval and recommendations.

But Kennedy repeatedly refused to acknowledge scientific consensus that childhood vaccines don’t cause autism and that COVID-19 vaccines saved millions of lives, and he falsely asserted the government has no good vaccine safety monitoring. While appearing to ignore mainstream science, he cited flawed or tangential research to make his points, such as suggesting Black people may need different vaccines than whites.

His responses raised concern among health experts that Kennedy lacks basic skills needed for the job.

“He ignores science. He cherry-picks sometimes fraudulent studies. Sometimes he takes well-done studies and takes little pieces of them out of context,” said Dr. Sean O’Leary of the American Academy of Pediatrics.

He worries that Kennedy could further damage public confidence in vaccines and “we will see return of diseases that we really haven’t seen much of and unfortunately children will suffer.”

Kennedy “in many ways demonstrated his lack of capacity to really understand some details around science and evidence that I think he would really need to know,” said Dr. Georges Benjamin of the American Public Health Association.

The science on vaccines is clear to doctors and scientists — but not to Kennedy

Sen. Bill Cassidy, a Louisiana Republican and physician, said the science is clear that measles and other childhood vaccines are safe and not linked to autism.

Kennedy said if shown the data he would recommend those vaccines and “not only will I do that but I will apologize for any statements that misled people otherwise.”

So Cassidy pulled out and read aloud definitive scientific conclusions that vaccines don’t cause autism. Kennedy rebuffed him, instead mentioning a recent paper that outside experts have called fundamentally flawed — and Cassidy agreed “has some issues” – in an attempt to counter decades of rigorous studies.

The senator told Kennedy his history of “undermining confidence in vaccines with unfounded or misleading arguments concerns me” – and risks casting “a shadow over President Trump’s legacy” if people die of vaccine-preventable diseases should he become health secretary.

Sen. Maggie Hassan, a Democrat from New Hampshire, said there’s a real-world ramification for “re-litigating and churning settled science” – diverting money and time that could be spent finding the real cause of autism.

Kennedy ignored science showing COVID-19 saved millions of lives

Kennedy claimed there’s no good surveillance system to know that COVID-19 vaccines are safe and lifesaving.

The U.S. tracks vaccine safety through multiple monitoring systems including electronic medical records from a list of health systems. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention also checks how vaccines fare internationally, such as during the pandemic when large databases from Israel and the U.K. helped reinforce that the new mRNA vaccines were safe and lowering deaths from the coronavirus.

“You’re applying for the job — clearly you should know this,” said Democratic Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont. “The scientific community has established that COVID vaccines saved millions of lives and you’re casting doubt.”

Kennedy declines to back a vaccine that prevents cancer in women

AAP’s O’Leary said there are about 35,000 cases of cancer related to the HPV virus that could be prevented by that vaccine, including 4,000 deaths per year. “We are already seeing decreases in the number of cases of HPV-related cancers as a result of HPV vaccination.”

Kennedy didn’t answer directly when asked if he stood by claims that the HPV vaccine could cause cancer or other disease. He instead brought up a pending lawsuit and suggested a jury — of non-scientists — would decide.

Kennedy’s unfounded comment about race and vaccine schedules

Sen. Angela Alsobrooks, a Maryland Democrat, asked Kennedy about prior comments that Black people might need a different vaccination schedule than whites. Alsobrooks, who is Black, asked how Kennedy thought she should have been vaccinated differently.

Kennedy referred to some earlier papers suggesting people of African-American ancestry had a stronger immune response to measles and rubella vaccines than white people.

Vaccination recommendations aren’t based on race but on biological factors such as someone’s age and risk of a specific disease. Some studies show Black Americans are more hesitant than whites to receive certain vaccines.

“That is so dangerous,” Alsobrooks told Kennedy.

“There’s no evidence that there needs to be a different vaccine schedule based on race,” said Dr. Amesh Adalja of the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. Such statements could make different populations wrongly believe “well, maybe I don’t need as many vaccines” as are recommended.

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AP Medical Writer Carla K. Johnson contributed.

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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

Lauran Neergaard And Mike Stobbe, The Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — Trump administration changes have upended the U.S. agency charged with providing humanitarian aid to countries overseas, with dozens of senior officials put on leave, thousands of contractors laid off, and a sweeping freeze imposed on billions of dollars in foreign assistance.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio defended the pause on foreign assistance Thursday, saying “the U.S. government is not a charity.”

Aid organizations say the funding freeze — and deep confusion over what U.S.-funded programs must stop work as a result — has left them agonizing over whether they could continue operating programs such as those providing round-the-clock nutritional support to extremely malnourished infants and children, knowing that closing the doors means that many of those children would die.

Current and former officials at the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development say staffers were invited to submit requests to exempt certain programs from the foreign aid freeze, which President Donald Trump imposed Jan. 20 and the State Department detailed how to execute on Jan. 24.

Three days later, at least 56 senior career USAID staffers were abruptly placed on administrative leave.

Three officials said many of those put on leave were lawyers involved in determining what programs might qualify for waivers, helping write proposals and submitting those waiver requests as they believed they had been invited to do.

The officials spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal. A Trump administration directive that aid organizations interpret as a gag order has left them unwilling to speak publicly for fear of permanently losing U.S. funding.

In an internal memo Monday about the staffing changes, new acting USAID administrator Jason Gray said the agency had identified “several actions within USAID that appear to be designed to circumvent the President’s Executive Orders and the mandate from the American people.”

“As a result, we have placed a number of USAID employees on administrative leave with full pay and benefits until further notice while we complete our analysis of these actions,” Gray wrote.

A former senior USAID official said those put on leave had been helping aid organizations navigate the “confusing process” to seek waivers from the aid pause for specific life-saving projects, such as continuing clean water supplies for displaced people in war zones.

Others were identified as having been involved in diversity, equity and inclusion programming, which the administration has banned.

On Thursday, a USAID human resources official who tried to reverse the action, saying there was no justification for it, was himself placed on leave, according to two of the officials who had viewed internal emails and verified them as authentic. Reporters from ProPublica and Vox first reported the emails on X.

The State Department and White House didn’t respond to messages seeking comment about the staffing changes.

The new leaders at USAID also abruptly laid off contractors who made up about half the workforce in the agency’s humanitarian bureau Tuesday, knocking them out of systems so that some vanished in the middle of videoconferences, the former senior official said. The targeted institutional service contractors do everything from administrative and travel support to grant processing and data analytics.

The staffing changes came three days after the State Department issued guidelines last Friday for implementing Trump’s executive order freezing foreign assistance for 90 days. The department says it’s reviewing the money the United States is spending to ensure it adheres to administration policy.

The guidelines initially exempted only military aid to Israel and Egypt and emergency food programs but also said program administrators and implementors could apply for waivers for programs that they believe would meet administration standards.

On Tuesday, Rubio issued a broader waiver for programs that provide other “life-saving” assistance, including medicine, medical services, food and shelter, and again pointed to the possibility of waivers. Rubio pointed to the broadened exemptions in an interview Thursday with SiriusXM host Megyn Kelly.

“We don’t want to see people die and the like,” he said.

Rubio said there would be a program-by-program review of which projects make “America safer, stronger or more prosperous.”

The step of shutting down U.S.-funded programs during the 90-day review meant the U.S. was “getting a lot more cooperation” from recipients of humanitarian, development and security assistance, Rubio said. “Because otherwise you don’t get your money.”

The State Department said that since the aid freeze went into effect, it has approved dozens of waivers, although many were returned because they did not include enough detail. It said waiver requests for programs costing “billions of dollars” have been received and are being reviewed.

The department did not specify how many waiver requests had been denied but said thus far its actions had stopped more than $1 billion from being spent on programs and projects that are “not aligned with an America First agenda.”

Even with the broadening of exemptions for life-saving care, uncertainty surrounds what U.S.-funded programs legally can continue. Hundreds of thousands of people globally are going without access to medicine and humanitarian supplies and clinics are not getting medicine in time because of the funding freeze, aid organizations warn.

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AP reporter Rebecca Santana in Washington contributed.

Matthew Lee And Ellen Knickmeyer, The Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — A collision between an American Airlines passenger jet and an Army helicopter near Washington, D.C., that killed 67 people brought renewed focus on the federal agency charged with investigating aviation disasters.

National Transportation Safety Board Chairwoman Jennifer Hommendy described the investigation into the crash Wednesday night as an “all-hands-on-deck event” for the agency during a news conference Thursday in which she appeared with members of the board and a senior investigator overseeing the probe.

Here are some things to know about the NTSB:

What does the agency do?

The NTSB is an independent federal agency responsible for investigating all civil aviation accidents as well as serious incidents in the U.S. involving other modes of transportation, such as railroad disasters and major accidents involving motor vehicles, marine vessels, pipelines and even commercial space operators.

“We’re here to ensure the American people that we are going to leave no stone unturned in this investigation,” Hommendy said, noting the probe is in the very early stages. “We are going to conduct a thorough investigation of this entire tragedy, looking at the facts.”

The agency has five board members who serve five-year terms and are nominated by the president and confirmed by the U.S. Senate.

How will the investigation work?

For the investigation into Wednesday’s crash, the NTSB will establish several different working groups, each responsible for investigating different areas connected to the accident, board member Todd Inman said.

Inman said those groups include operations, which will examine flight history and crewmember duties; structures, which will document airframe wreckage and the accident scene; power plants, which will focus on aircraft engines and engine accessories; systems, which will study the electrical, hydraulic and pneumatic components of the two aircraft; air traffic control, which will review flight track surveillance information, including radar, and controller-pilot communications; survival factors, which will analyze the injuries to the crew and passengers and crash and rescue efforts; and a helicopter group.

The investigation also will include a human-performance group that will be a part of the operations, air traffic control and helicopter groups and will study the crew performance and any factors that could be involved such as human error, including fatigue, medications, medical histories, training and workload, Inman said.

How long will the investigation take?

NTSB officials did not say Thursday how long the investigation would take, but accident investigations often take between one to two years to complete.

The agency typically releases a preliminary report within a few weeks of the accident that includes a synopsis of information collected at the scene.

What is the NTSB’s history?

The NTSB history dates to 1926, when Congress passed a law charging the U.S. Department of Commerce with investigating aircraft accidents.

It was established as an independent agency within the U.S. Department of Transportation in 1967 and then separated by Congress in 1974 as a stand-alone organization, fully independent from any other federal agencies.

Since its creation in 1967, the agency reports it has investigated more than 153,000 aviation accidents and incidents.

The Associated Press

PHOENIX (AP) — Democratic Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs renewed a push Thursday to regulate groundwater in rural parts of the drought-stricken state, and she’s more optimistic this time that her efforts will find support in the Republican-controlled Legislature.

Hobbs stood alongside local officials, rural Republican leaders and Democratic lawmakers to unveil her proposal to create new management areas to regulate groundwater pumping — long used by farmers and rural residents without restriction. She urged legislators to take swift action to reach consensus.

“We made more progress last year on negotiating rural groundwater reform than has been made ever,” Hobbs said. “We’re not starting at ground zero. We’re starting at a good place.”

Identical bills were introduced in both chambers Thursday, but neither has Republican co-sponsors. Local conservative leaders like Prescott Mayor Phil Goode urged Republicans in the Legislature not to see water as a partisan issue.

“Last time I checked, there wasn’t Democratic water and Republican water,” he said. “There’s water for our state.”

Travis Lingenfelter, a Republican who chairs the Mohave County Board of Supervisors, said he expects Republicans to introduce rural groundwater legislation early next week, which the senate GOP spokesperson said she could not confirm.

Lingenfelter said Republicans and Democrats started at “polar opposite” places last year, but ongoing negotiations have brought the two sides “really close” to a middle ground.

Groundwater already is regulated in the state’s most populous areas — including Phoenix and Tucson — called active management areas, through a law passed in 1980 that hasn’t been updated since.

The legislation attempts to provide a just-right alternative between active management areas and irrigation non-expansion areas that limit farming on new land. Active management areas have been criticized as too regulatory, and irrigation non-expansion areas have been called not regulatory enough.

The legislation would create four rural groundwater management areas in basins experiencing severe decline near Gila Bend, Kingman, Vicksburg and Willcox, and shift the Willcox Basin that Hobbs designated as an active management area to the less restrictive model proposed in the legislation.

Conservation guidelines are intended to be more flexible than what Democrats proposed last year. The legislation also would establish councils — similar to what Republicans previously sought — with local leaders who will have the authority to set conservation targets.

Hobbs said she would not hesitate to act unilaterally if the Legislature fails to come to an agreement this session.

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Sejal Govindarao, The Associated Press