President Trump has issued at least three executive orders aimed at stopping racial discrimination, including affirmative action and disparate-impact analysis. The orders fulfill the constitutional requirement of equal protection of the laws, forbidding government from treating people differently based on race. They also reinforce Chief Justice John Roberts’s observation that “the way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”

One simple way that the Trump administration can promote these objectives is by revising the Office of Management and Budget’s Statistical Policy Directive 15, which specifies the kind of data on race and ethnicity government agencies must collect. The current directive is unconstitutional, discriminatory and scientifically unsound.

If OMB revised the directive to prohibit the collection of racial data, it would make it more difficult for regulators and attorneys to devise schemes for government to discriminate by race. Such a protection of Americans’ liberty would be even more robust and enduring if enacted by Congress rather than the executive branch. But in the meantime, a revised directive could halt this unconstitutional race accounting.

The directive has been flawed ever since the OMB developed it in 1977, but the Biden administration last year revised it to expand racial and ethnic classifications, creating more unconstitutional racial bases for government reward and punishment. It created a Middle Eastern or North African race, or MENA; respondents were previously classified as white.

Meanwhile, white was redefined to mean only people of European origin. It also changed Hispanic or Latino to being a major race, rather than an ethnicity that was applied to people already classified within one of the races. The Biden administration’s revisions specified 6,676 detailed racial categories within the seven major races, including so many ethnicities for the American Indian and Alaska Native category that the average population of each detailed category is 678 people.

To revise the directive in time for the 2030 decennial census, the Census Bureau by statute has until April 1, 2027, to advise Congress of the changes. If it fails to do so, the next census won’t be protected from the directive’s harmful requirements.

The current directive violates the scientific objectivity that underlies the missions for the leading statistical agencies. The racial classifications aren’t based on objective facts but merely represent the opinions of survey respondents about their origins selected from a list offered by a government employee. Not only do we have recent cases of public figures misrepresenting their origins, but the directive itself includes the following admission: “The categories in these standards are understood to be sociopolitical constructs and are not an attempt to define race and ethnicity biologically or genetically.”

OMB’s expansion of racial/​ethnic categories has consequences. If you split a population into more subgroups, you will get more groups that show outcomes different from the average—a gift to litigators and regulators who want to dole out unconstitutional rewards based on race.

The racial classification structure is incoherent and illogical. The directive ties race to country of origin. For instance, the directive defines Asian as “individuals with origins in any of the original peoples of Central or East Asia, Southeast Asia, or South Asia,” and then lists some examples. Such a classification scheme is nonsense, especially since many of the “original people” listed are people currently living in the region. For millennia, human history has consisted of repeated episodes of one group of people displacing another through expulsion, subjugation, genocide or other means.

The directive designates Turks as the “original” people of modern-day Turkey, which has been inhabited by successions of people throughout history—including Hurrians, Greeks, Armenians, Persians and Kurds. Turks from Central Asia invaded and settled Antatolia during the 11th century but completed the conquest only after the 1453 fall of Constantinople, followed by hundreds of years of expulsions and genocide of their predecessors’ descendents. Turks weren’t the “original” people of what is now Turkey.

America doesn’t need racial classifications. Between the censuses of 2010 and 2020, the number of Americans reporting that they belonged to more than one race jumped by 276%. Some 20% of new marriages in the U.S. are between people of different races, and their children are multiracial. This rapidly growing segment of the population with multiple racial roots means that when establishing the most intimate and significant of human relationships—the family—identification with race is becoming less important. So why do government bureaucrats insist on keeping the distinctions and are reinforcing, expanding and mandating them?

OMB has attempted to hide the unconstitutional and unethical uses of its racial accounting, asserting that “the race and/​or ethnicity categories are not to be used as determinants of eligibility for participation in any Federal program.” But when OMB proposed changing its race and ethnicity statistical standards, it provided such justifications as the following: “Data could be used to allocate program or initiative benefits.” “MENA population counts could be used to allocate needed resources.” “Foremost consideration should be given to data … useful for statistical analysis, program administration and assessment, and enforcement.”

The Census Bureau is using the Biden administration’s flawed methodology to collect racial data for parts of the Current Population Survey and has plans to implement it fully in the American Community Survey in 2027 and in the 2030 decennial census. The Trump administration should stop this discriminatory madness before it’s too late.