UPDATE 2-Trump: lawyers working on census citizenship question on July 4

U.S. President Donald Trump said on Thursday that government lawyers were working to find a way to include a citizenship question in the 2020 census, even on the federal July Fourth holiday.

Facing a deadline to get the census forms printed, administration officials, including Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, said on Tuesday they were going ahead without including the question. A day later, Trump reversed that decision in a Twitter post, saying, "We are absolutely moving forward."

"Department of Commerce and the Department of Justice are working very hard on this, even on the 4th of July!" Trump wrote in another post early on Thursday. Trump was considering issuing an executive order on including the question, Axios reported, citing a senior legal source.

The White House did not respond to a request for comment on the report. The Supreme Court last week blocked the question from being included, saying administration officials had given a "contrived" rationale for including the query in the decennial U.S. population survey.

The court, however, left open the possibility that the administration could offer a plausible rationale. The census is used to allot seats in the U.S. House of Representatives and distribute some $800 billion in federal funds services including public schools, Medicaid benefits, law enforcement, and highway repairs.

Critics have called the citizenship question a Republican ploy to scare immigrants into not participating and engineer a population undercounts in Democratic-leaning areas with high immigrant and Latino populations. They say that would help Trump's fellow Republicans gain seats in the House and state legislatures when new electoral district boundaries are drawn.