Terri Ann Lowenthal

Lowenthal was a prominent critic of the first Trump administration’s proposal to add a citizenship-status question to the 2020 Census, which she said would depress responses from immigrant households and damage the accuracy of the count. She had previously spent a 14-year career as a U.S. Congressional aide, including service as a staff director of the U.S. House of Representatives subcommittee that oversaw the census from 1987 to 1994, and she worked as a consultant to organizations that worked to increase census participation. ^{4  3  2}

Career

Government Service

Terri Ann Lowenthal spent 14 years as a congressional aide in the U.S. House of Representatives and U.S. Senate. From 1987 to 1994, she was a staff director of the House subcommittee with jurisdiction over the census and the federal statistical system. She served as the chief of staff to former U.S. Representative Thomas Sawyer (D-OH). Earlier, she was a staff assistant to former U.S. Senator Lowell Weicker (R-CT) and worked on the House Education and Labor Committee. In 2008, she covered the U.S. Census Bureau and broader federal statistical activities for the presidential transition team of then-incoming President Barack Obama. ^{1  4}

Census Consulting

As a consultant, Terri Ann Lowenthal worked as a senior advisor to the Funders Census Initiative, a project of the Funders Committee for Civic Participation (FCCP), a left-of-center donors’ network that directed philanthropic money toward increasing census participation. The initiative encouraged foundations to make grants designed to raise the census response rates of immigrants, racial minorities, low-income individuals, and young people, which Lowenthal and allied funders alleged were chronically undercounted. Lowenthal said that for the 2010 Census, the associated funders’ committee had raised an estimated $34 million in philanthropic support. The broader effort drew support from left-of-center foundations, including the Ford Foundation, the Heising-Simons Foundation, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, and the W. K. Kellogg Foundation. ³

Lowenthal was a co-director of The Census Project, a coalition that lobbied the U.S. Congress for increased Census Bureau funding and for census methods intended to reduce undercounts of racial minority and immigrant communities, through 2016, and afterward served on the project’s advisory committee. She also advised the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, a coalition of left-of-center civil rights organizations, and Bloomberg Associates, affiliated with Bloomberg Philanthropies, on census matters. ^{5  4}

2020 Census

Before the 2020 Census, the Trump administration announced that it would add a question on respondents’ citizenship status to the census questionnaire. Lowenthal emerged as a vocal critic of this proposal, telling The Nation that statements from the Trump administration did not ease concerns that the question was political and partisan in nature. She also expressed concern that even after the U.S. Supreme Court prevented the question from being included, immigrants would still be reticent to respond to the census because they heard the question would be included. ²

Political Views

Terri Ann Lowenthal has tried to present herself as offering neutral technocratic expertise, with one interviewer from the left-of-center The Nation stating that she “mastered a delicate, plausibly apolitical idiom” to criticize people who disagreed with her census views. In one instance, Lowenthal responded to an interviewer’s suggestion that then-U.S. Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross had lied by stating that the position was the interviewer’s, not necessarily her own. ²

Lowenthal worked as a staffed for both Democratic and Republican U.S. Congressional offices but worked on the 2008 transition team of then-incoming President Barack Obama. However, she opposed the inclusion of a citizenship question on the 2020 census, and had been involved with numerous left-of-center nonprofits working to increase the census count among Democratic-leaning constituencies. ^{4  5  2}

With the exception of a $250 contribution to the 2012 U.S. Senate campaign of former U.S. Rep. Chris Shays (R-CT) in her home state of Connecticut, as of June 2026, Terri Ann Lowenthal’s political contributions had gone exclusively to Democrats and left-of-center organizations, including the pro-abortion EMILY’s List and Democratic fundraising conduit ActBlue. ⁶