In the midst of a weekslong shutdown and a furloughed, demoralized federal workforce, the U.S. Census Bureau has been sitting pretty. It has up to two months of carryover funding, and it recently got a new head in former Peace Corps senior bureaucrat Steven Dillingham. Dillingham’s unanimous Senate confirmation vote speaks to a rare bipartisan consensus nowadays that the government must perform and complete a nationwide census next year.
President Trump’s proposal to include a “citizenship question” on the 2020 count has brought the census, and the Bureau’s problems, back into the spotlight. Just like every other government agency, census operations are plagued by government waste and inefficiency. The census has gotten more expensive and continues to outpace inflation, despite a declining number of individuals per household and a rise in low-cost digital correspondence.
According to the Government Accountability Office, “the average cost for counting a housing unit increased from about $16 in 1970 to around $92 in 2010.” There is also questionable spending. In 2010, the U.S. Census Bureau spent $2.5 million on Super Bowl ads that were “dry, uninformative, and culturally obscure,” according to leading television critics. Given the bureau’s cost escalation, wasteful spending, and well-documented accuracy problems, it may be time to look to another approach to count the nation’s citizens. By ditching a dedicated decennial census, the federal government can save taxpayers billions of dollars while obtaining vital information elsewhere.
Since the ratification of the Constitution and the subsequent 1790 census, the “enumeration” has been dutifully carried out every ten years with increases in the number and scope of questions asked. While this requirement hasn’t been challenged in Congress and the courts, other countries in recent decades have begun to see a dedicated census as redundant.
A United Nations survey on the enumeration methods of different countries notes that more than a dozen European countries, including the Netherlands, Norway, Germany, and Switzerland, link their already-existing administrative records to create census-type records. This sounds like a reasonable approach if the quality of the data is thorough enough to provide decent record-keeping. In 1995, the National Research Council considered an administrative records-based system as an alternative to the current process, noting that a “high proportion of the U.S. population is included in one or more existing administrative records … the coverage … may well expand in the future.” The alleged problem is the allowable scope, since “no federal or state administrative system now possesses race and ethnicity data for the U.S. population.”
But questions on race and ethnicity merely undermine the census’s original purpose of determining governmental apportionment and representation. Slaves were counted and distinguished in the first censuses, only because slaveholders were eager to have them count so as to augment their congressional representation. This led to the despicable Three-Fifths Compromise.
The focus on race and ethnicity counters the American aspiration to be a color-blind society and adds unnecessary costs to the system. Besides, the current census massively undercounts minorities, since marginalized communities are far less likely to respond to the U.S. Census Bureau’s inquiries. Records from the Internal Revenue Service and the Social Security Administration, on the other hand, do not underrepresent communities less likely to respond to a census questionnaire. Each year, millions of illegal immigrants file taxes, ensuring that the IRS will have documentation that the census might miss.
Are birth, death, and tax records up to the task of substituting for a household-by-household enumeration? Ideally, IRS data can be used to track state residence and migration, combined with Social Security data to keep tabs on births and deaths. Tax data can prove tricky, since a large portion of the population has no tax liability. The IRS, however, has information documents on nonfilers in their Information Returns Master File. IRS researchers have previously used sampling and merging techniques to produce state-by-state population estimates, with encouraging results. They find that “the overall correspondence between census and administrative records data is extremely good,” with results for a majority of states either within three percentage points of the census estimate or closer to adjusted census estimates than the original, official count.
In important respects, an administrative records-based census might actually run smoother than a census. Taxpayers can look forward to saving tens of billions of dollars each decade on a needlessly intrusive process. While constitutional questions may arise over “enumeration,” counting individuals via SSA and IRS records should pass muster as just another way of counting individuals and households.
At a time of unprecedented gridlock, Congress has a rare bipartisan opportunity to end the census and deliver billions of dollars in savings to taxpayers. The American public deserves a 21st century enumeration without the waste and redundancy of the status quo.
Ross Marchand is the director of policy for the Taxpayers Protection Alliance.
