Census lacks cash, advocates warn

WASHINGTON — The next national census is still three years away, but national advocacy groups say the government is running out of time and money to do it right.

Despite plans to change how people are counted in the constitutionally required census, observers say the U.S. Census Bureau won’t be able to fully make the switch if Congress doesn’t act soon to increase the bureau’s budget.

Among other purposes, the count of the nation’s population is used to draw congressional districts.

In 2010, the census found that California’s population didn’t grow as quickly as other states’. NALEO Educational Fund, a Hispanic advocacy group among those raising census-funding concerns, estimated last year that thousands of Hispanic children in the Los Angeles area weren’t counted in the 2010 census.

In 2020, the Census Bureau plans to count people through online and phone surveys, rather than just using mailed surveys or workers knocking on doors.

The Census Bureau hopes that using more technology will make the count more accurate and help shave $5 billion from what was otherwise expected to be a more than $17 billion cost for preparatory work and the census itself.

But to do that, the bureau has to build new systems and test them extensively. The Census Bureau has already canceled a few tests of the new methods, including one in Puerto Rico to determine its ability to collect data only in Spanish, citing uncertainty over the census’s budget. A test of collecting data digitally in several Asian languages held in Los Angeles last summer was conducted.

In 2018, the Census Bureau is supposed to hold the final, largescale test that would be a dress rehearsal for the 2020 census.

“If Congress really wants the bureau to save those $5 billion in 2020, they need to spend the money now to get it right. There’s no do-overs come 2020,” said the NALEO Educational Fund’s executive director, Arturo Vargas.