The U.S. Census Bureau has incited outrage from the LGTBQ+ community after it redacted the inclusion of a field accounting for LGTBQ+ Americans in an initial release of categories included in the 2020 U.S. Census.

While the survey is issued only once a decade by the U.S. Census Bureau, a draft of the census must be issued three years prior to the year of the survey.

Neither the U.S. Census nor the American Community Survey have ever collected data for LGTBQ+ statistics. The U.S. Census Bureau said in a statement to NBC News that the report “inadvertently listed sexual orientation and gender identity as a proposed topic in the appendix.”

This incident with the U.S. Census comes one week after The Department of Health and Human Services removed a field tracking elderly LGTBQ+ Americans in the National Survey of Older Americans Act Participants. According to NBC News, the removal of the field came with no warning from the Trump Administration.

“If the government doesn’t know how many LGBTQ+ people live in a community, how can it do its job to ensure we’re getting fair and adequate access to the rights, protections and services we need?” Criminal and Economic Justice Project Director at the National LGBTQ+ Task Force Meghan Maury, told 
NBC News.