Congress moves to build a national citizenship database, stripping privacy protections
H.R. 5156 — COUNT Act · Filed by August Pfluger (R-TX) · 8 cosponsors · Introduced Sep 4, 2025 · Referred to committee
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What it does
This bill directs the Department of Commerce and federal agencies to collect and share citizenship status data on all U.S. residents, including noncitizens and undocumented immigrants. It requires agencies like DHS, State Department, Social Security Administration, and HHS to provide access to their administrative records (visa files, passport data, Medicaid records, etc.) to help the Census Bureau determine citizenship for 100% of the population, adds a citizenship question to the 2030 census, and eliminates the Census Bureau's use of 'differential privacy' — a statistical technique that protects individual privacy by adding noise to data.
Why we flagged it
The bill's operative mechanism is a data-collection and data-sharing mandate across federal agencies, coupled with elimination of privacy protections. While framed as immigration policy, its primary effect is structural: it builds a unified citizenship database and removes statistical privacy safeguards that currently shield individuals from re-identification.
What the text implies
- Elimination of differential privacy on census data means individual responses become more vulnerable to re-identification attacks, potentially exposing sensitive personal information (income, health status, immigration history) linked to names and addresses.
- Merging DHS visa/asylum records, State Department passport data, SSA beneficiary records, and HHS Medicaid/CHIP data creates a de facto national citizenship registry accessible to Census Bureau and potentially other agencies, with no explicit statutory privacy safeguards governing downstream use.
The full analysis lists 5 implications of this text.
Who it affects
The bill creates a comprehensive citizenship surveillance infrastructure that merges sensitive personal data across federal agencies without explicit privacy protections, and eliminates differential privacy safeguards that currently protect individual responses from re-identification. Citizens lose privacy protections and face increased risk of data exposure, while the stated policy goal (immigration enforcement data) primarily serves government enforcement priorities, not public benefit.