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US Census Director Forced Out, Threatening Reliability of 2020 Census
While everyone was rightfully focused on the firing of the FBI director, Director John Thompson of the U.S. Census Bureau abruptly resgined after Congress refused to provide adequate funding for the upcoming 2020 census.
The news, which surprised census experts, follows an April congressional budget allocation for the census that critics say is woefully inadequate. And it comes less than a week after a prickly hearing at which Thompson told lawmakers that cost estimates for a new electronic data collection system had ballooned by nearly 50 percent.
“It’s like two trains going down the track toward each other, with Republicans decrying the budget overrun and Democrats saying the census has been underfunded,” Phil Sparks, co-director of the Census Project, a watchdog organization, said of the May 3 hearing before the House Appropriations subcommittee on commerce, justice and science. “This puts the census in the crosshairs both ways.”
The underfunding of the census and the resignation of the highly experience bureau director combine to threaten the reliability of the decennial census and creates an opening for the administration to misallocate House members and electoral votes to their advantage. This could have serious long term implications.
An accurate census is crucial to properly allocating representatives at both the federal and state level. Congressional Republican have been pushing the agency to cut costs, ignoring inflation and the nearly 10% growth of the nation's population. Republican underfunding of the bureau damage census takers' ability to accurately account for those population most difficult to count - low-income Americans and minorities; coincidentally, or not, these are the same demographic groups most likely to vote for Democrats.
An accurate decennial census is also crucial in fairly distributing federal spending, and many federal program rely on accurrate census figures to accomplish their goals. While the Census Bureau often appears to be one of the more boring agencies, their work is vitally important to the smooth operations of the federal government.
ACTION: Call your congresspeople and ask that they push Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross and the White House to name a qualified replacement for John Thompson as soon as possible, and to increase the budget allocation for the agency so the Constitutionally required decennial census can be performed accurately.