2020 census to debut a largely online count
Worries on fairness, accuracy loom as deadline nears.
WASHINGTON — Census experts and public officials are expressing growing concerns that the bedrock mission of the 2020 census — an accurate and trustworthy head count of everyone in the United States — is imperiled, with worrisome implications.
Preparations for the count already are complicated by a sea change in the census itself: For the first time, it will be conducted largely online instead of by mail.
But as the Census Bureau ramps up its spending and workforce for the 2020 count, it is saddled with problems. Its two top administrative posts are filled by placeholders.
Years of underfunding by Congress and cost overruns on the digital transition have forced the agency to pare its preparations, including abandoning two of the three trial runs of the overhauled census process.
Civil liberties advocates also fear that the Trump administration is injecting political considerations into the bureau, a rigidly nonpartisan agency whose population count will be the basis for redrawing congressional and state legislative districts in the early 2020s.
And there is broad agreement that the administration’s aggressive enforcement of immigration policies will make it even harder to reach minorities, immigrants in the country illegally and others whose numbers have long been undercounted.
Taken together, some experts say, those issues substantially raise the risk that the 2020 count could be flawed, disputed, or both.
“There’s a set of unprecedented challenges that collectively threaten to create a perfect storm in 2020,” Terri Ann Lowenthal, a consultant and a leading authority on the census, said in an interview. “If public confidence in the objectivity and quality of the 2020 census erodes, then another pillar of our representative democracy could be compromised.”
A bungled count could have profound consequences. Data from the census — which aims to count everyone, whether citizens or not — dictate the distribution of more than $600 billion yearly in grants and subsidies to state and local governments. Demographic data from the count are the bases for surveys that are bench marks for major businesses, governments and researchers.
The census results also will determine which states will gain or lose seats in the House of Representatives and how those lines are drawn when redistricting begins in 2021.
Serious undercounts would invite lawsuits that could hogtie that process, some experts said, and sap public trust in one of the government’s core functions.
The bureau has been working on the 2020 count since the 2010 census was completed. The complete overhaul now underway seeks to shrink the count’s costliest and toughest task: sending hundreds of thousands of enumerators to find and interview the millions of people who fail to fill out their census forms.
An online head count, the reasoning goes, should reach more households more efficiently than mailed forms.
The enumerators who track down those who do not respond (in 2010, almost 3 in 10 households) will use smartphone apps that instantly send data to the bureau’s computers and track the canvassers’ progress.
The bureau also hopes to mine federal databases and even satellite images for information that could reduce wasted trips by enumerators — to vacant buildings, for example — and automatically fill in personal data like addresses and ages.
The goal is to rein in the ballooning cost of censuses, from $1.22 per person counted in 1970 to more than $42 in 2010.
Legislators exasperated by the $13 billion cost of the 2010 tally demanded the 2020 tally not exceed that level, but that backfired: Census officials underestimated the cost of the digital transition, ensuring cost overruns.
Compounding that, Congress has regularly given the agency less money than it said was needed — $200 million less through fiscal 2017 — forcing officials to slow or eliminate programs.
It also has canceled dry runs of the completed census process in Washington state and West Virginia that would have documented its performance in rural areas with spotty internet service and Native American reservations that do not use standard addresses.
It has abandoned plans for smartphone canvasses in group-living quarters like college dorms and prisons, and scaled back its culling of information from federal databases.
“The record of the census in counting people from all income groups, all racial and ethnic groups, is really extraordinary,” said Steve H. Murdock, a Rice University sociologist who led the Census Bureau under President George W. Bush. “Once you break that belief in the activity, it’s hard to replace.”