U.S. Census Bureau officials think they have some much-needed solutions to control steadily spiraling costs of their decennial head count of Americans, but a congressional watchdog agency is dubious that the new approaches will work, if they’re even ready on time.
Bureau planning for the 2020 census has begun this year and officials promise to make better use of the Internet and take advantage of data other federal agencies like the IRS and Social Security Administration have on hand.
Billions of tax dollars are at stake.
“The census is a massive undertaking, and its costs have increased by more than 500 percent over the past 50 years,” according to the Government Accountability Office in a recent report. If the new approaches work, Bureau officials project the 2020 census will cost $12.7 billion. If not, costs could reach $17.8 billion.
Costs increased between 2000 and 2010 by 60 percent, from $8.1 billion to $13 billion after adjusting for inflation, according to the accountability office. That figure included $3 billion Census officials spent on data collection devices that didn’t work during the 2010 survey.
Accountability office auditors said the cost of counting each housing unit escalated from around $14 in 1970 to around $94 in 2010. Cost hikes have averaged 63 percent per house each decade and there are about 140 million housing units in the country now. House visits, which are necessary when people don’t respond to other contact methods, are historically the most expensive part of the head counting.
Among the innovations touted by Census officials is allowing people to be counted via the Internet, but the congressional watchdog worries that without improvements the government lacks the technological infrastructure to support such a program.
The accountability office said the Bureau’s $73 million estimate for the Internet response project “lacks reliability, which in turn, calls into question the reliability of the potential cost savings estimate of about $550 million to $1 billion.”
It’s also possible that the project will not be completed by the 2020 census. “It is uncertain how the bureau can ensure that there is sufficient time to accomplish this objective,” the recent report said.
Bureau officials assured investigators that plans are being developed to ensure the Internet response project is done correctly and that “the wording or descriptions of these activities in its documentation may use internal jargon that may make them difficult to find for those who do not regularly work on these activities.”
The 2010 census used 506 offices and employed 550,000 staff on the ground. If the Bureau uses the same methods in the 2020 census, the number of offices will stay above 500 and the number of employees will jump to more than 750,000.
Bureau officials project their new methods could drop those figures to 150 offices and 200,000 staff on the ground. They will report their cost-cutting progress and describe the 2020 Census design to Congress in the fall.
