What, religious data? Are you serious? That's one of the most critical things they can track about their citizens.

Let's say your town has a lot of pig farmers. The pig farmers are afraid their business is diminishing. So they lobby the local government to put a tax on chicken and beef, to encourage more pork consumption. Which local officials might be inclined to do for economic reasons. But then you collect religious data, and it turns out 50% of the population is Jewish, Muslim, and Hindu. So half the population now has to pay a tax, which is effectively a tax on their religion, because their religious belief says they can't eat pork.

This is a made up example, but the point is that you need to know about your citizens so you can make just laws that respect those citizens (and encourage businesses, job training, etc based on demographics). It's why we have a census.

Say you get your way, and, for fear of Mark Carney rolling the tanks in and taking over North America, the US stops collecting any data on its citizens. How is the IRS supposed to know how much tax to expect from you? How is SNAP supposed to determine your eligibility? How is unemployment supposed to know if you're ripping them off or not? Data privacy is a real concern, but you need PII to run government services effectively. Running a state without collecting PII is like running a hospital without collecting any.

Administration doesn't care about race, but conservative in groups and liberal out groups. Race is a sort of proxy drumbbeat to appease the most stupid of their base. This is why people like Marco Rubio or Scott Turner are part of the in group despite the seeming cognitive dissonance there. There are a shocking number of black and latino people in this country who do in fact support this regime. There are gay republicans. Muslim republicans. All of this is tolerated by the in group if they are ideologically conservative.

You know how you target best based on ideology? Not the damn census. Social media. What you post, who you follow, all of that stuff we forgot that ICE was getting from travelers at the border imaging their cellphone. That stuff is far more accurate to what you are today, right now, at this minute, and where you fall in light of this regime, and what risk you present to the state and its power structures.

You can look at the sample form for 2020 census and you will find it is not on there.

The United States are listed as a secular state (ie. it "is or purports to be officially neutral in matters of religion")

Edit: As I research a bit further, I have stumbled upon an interesting counterargument [1] that enumeration of ethnicity and ethnic groups results in "more political discrimination and state-sponsored violence targeting ethnic groups". Perhaps a similar conclusion could be reached about religious census information.

[1] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1369183X.2025.2...

why it makes sense? please try to answer. what action of the gov would change based on that data?

then, make it so your answer is more valid than if they asked what you usually have for breakfast.

i guarantee you more gov actions can be positively impacted by the breakfast question than the religion one.

the ONLY use for religious data is to get it for free for campaigns.

With that perspective, how do you prevent scope creep when preparing a census exercise? You would collect everything and the shape of each house's kitchen sink, because "it can be useful".