“Relatedly, a court may not set aside an agency’s policymaking decision solely because it might have been influenced by political considerations or prompted by an Administration’s priorities.”
The opinion sets the framework for the lower court review.
Roberts made this way more complicated than it needed to be, with his cowardly fence straddling, but the end result is that the agency can do this if it really wants to.
He managed to take a case where there were 5 votes to stop it, and make a unanimous decision that tells the lower court that if the “reason given” is “We thought that knowing how many people were in a state illegally might be a useful piece of information to advance our policy agenda with the american people” — that is a good reason, and cannot be rejected.
Meanwhile, they also said that the lower court can’t use any of the other arguments, they can only rule on whether there is a rational basis for asking the question. If the administration can’t put THAT together, they deserve to lose.