With 2010 Tally Fast Approaching, Census Funding Under Attack
By Robert Gebeloff
Newhouse News Service
August 24, 2006
If your mechanic told you a $500 major tune-up would likely prevent a $10,000 engine overhaul in a few years, would you whip out your checkbook?
Or would you drive away and spend the $500 on something else?
This question - on a much larger scale - is now confronting Congress as it mulls the financial fate of the 2010 Census.
The Census Bureau's $878 million 2007 budget was slashed this summer by more than $50 million by lawmakers in each chamber. Ultimately, a conference committee will decide on a final figure, and with the fiscal stress hanging over Washington these days, the odds are long that the bureau will get its full budget restored.
Which is why Census Director C. Louis Kincannon has been sending out this message lately: Restore the $50 million now and save American taxpayers $1 billion in the long run. The money, he said, will go toward computerizing certain functions that would otherwise have to be done by pen and paper.
It sounds like a no-brainer -- nobody wants to be penny-wise and pound-foolish.
Trouble is, some in Congress have reacted like a skeptical motorist who just received the $500-will-save-you-$10,000 pitch from Louie the mechanic.
Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., is among the unconvinced.
"I am skeptical that the agency could not operate with a slightly smaller budget," he wrote in a letter to Kincannon earlier this month.
In a press release posted on his Web site, Coburn vowed "to do everything I can to make sure the budget cuts in the House and Senate stand."
Ouch.
You would think a mild-mannered statistical agency would not have enemies on Capitol Hill, but the Census bureau has two problems.
Of practical concern is a series of reports from the General Accounting Office that have taken the bureau to task for a spate of technical and financial issues. While these reports are in some ways a typical byproduct of what good auditors find any time they look closely at a massive federal agency, they also provide plenty of fodder for congressional critics.
But a more fundamental problem for the bureau is that many in Congress simply don't understand how the bureau works and how the Census budget cycle differs from other federal agencies.
The bureau's raison d'etre is codified in the U.S. Constitution, which calls for representative taxation and government based on a decennial enumeration of the population.
But the modern Census bureau does far more than count heads every 10 years. The bureau produces a vast array of "data products" used by other government agencies, academics and the business community.
A person taking a random stroll through the Census Web site might learn that American liquor stores recorded sales of $3.2 billion in June, up from $2.9 million last year, according to the bureau's Monthly Retail Trade Survey.
Or that U.S. exports of bakery products are on the rise, though not by as much as imports of fish and shellfish, according to the bureau's Foreign Trade Division.
Or that the nation's Hispanic population is growing nearly seven times faster than the non-Hispanic population, according to the Population Division's annual estimates.
And those are just side projects.
The two most important Census functions are the decennial population count used for congressional apportionment -- the capital "C" Census -- and the American Community Survey, the bureau's most comprehensive effort to demographically profile the nation.
Here's where the controversy lies. Counting every single person in the United States, and then surveying enough households to produce an exhaustive list of characteristics about the population is a big job.
The bureau can't wait until 2009, then say, "Let's put on a Census!" and produce a spectacular survey the next day.
The bureau needs to update its master list of every address in America -- about 111 million households in all. It needs to prepare for a 2008 dress rehearsal to verify that the data collected are being processed correctly.
The Census bureau began planning for these two massive undertakings years ago and reported to Congress that the entire production would cost $11.3 billion.
The spending is supposed to start small, then grow exponentially as 2010 draws near. For lawmakers who don't understand this, it looks in any given year like the Census is getting a big raise, while other agencies are being held back.
One crucial aspect of the plan was to develop handheld Global Positioning System devices that Census employees could take to homes that did not return questionnaires in the mail.
These follow-up operations are crucial to the success of the Census and one of the biggest cost centers. In congressional testimony last month, Kincannon said it costs about $10 if a household returns an American Community Survey form in the mail.
But if the Census has to send an employee to the home to conduct the survey in person, the cost increases at least tenfold.
The GPS devices would cut into those costs dramatically because data could be collected in the field and entered into a database instantly, instead of having a Census taker filling out a paper form and another employee typing the results into the database at a later date.
Kincannon says the budget cuts would likely kill the GPS program and force the bureau to stick with the paper alternative -- which is why he's telling Congress they can save $1 billion if they restore the $50 million in cuts.
But this is where the bureau's GAO problem might come back to haunt it. Essentially, Uncle Sam's chief watchdog agency has told Congress that the Census bureau has not produced detailed backup financial information for any of its 2010 budget requests.
Which gives lawmakers like Coburn reason to disbelieve.
"The Census Bureau does not have a firm grasp over its long term financial planning," he wrote in his letter to Kincannon.
While the Census faces an uphill battle this fall getting the money restored, observers don't expect the Census to actually take money away from its two primary programs, the 2010 Census and the American Community Survey. If cuts have to be made, then the money might have to come out of one of the secondary surveys.
One of the ironies is that the money cut from the Census on the House floor was redirected to the Edward Byrne Justice Assistance Grant program -- a program that relies heavily on Census data to identify neighborhoods in need of resources.
Senator Tom Coburn
172 Russell Senate Office Bldg. Washington, DC 20510
Phone: 202-224-5754 Fax: 202-224-6008
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