Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross said Tuesday the economy is doing so well under the Trump administration his department may have a hard time finding 500,000 people to knock on doors during the government’s 2020 census.
A lot of the people that would ordinarily be hired as Census Bureau enumerators will likely have better jobs, he said.
“The hiring was not such a huge task in 2010 because the country was unfortunately in a recession, so there were plenty of people available. In 2020, we are liable to have a much more difficult time hiring people. And so that is one of the big tasks ahead of us,” Ross told the the House Appropriations Committee Tuesday morning.
The Trump administration is requesting $3.8 billion from Congress for the Census Bureau in the coming fiscal year, $3.1 billion of which will be devoted to taking the decennial Census.
Ross said the once-a-decade task was the “top priority” of his department and he had “total confidence” in the department career staff who would be handling it.
