Census ’20 should be top Trump priority

REPEALING ObamaCare. Reforming tax laws. Building a wall. Golfing. Supreme Court picks. Defending against whatever the Russians did or didn’t do. Golfing. Fighting daily with the Democrats.

President Trump has been plenty busy during his first two months in office. Too busy, it seems, to pay much attention to something that will have the most enduring impact on the country for the next decade.

I’m talking about the 2020 census, which is the constitutionally required once-a-decade head count of Americans that is used to parcel out hundreds of billions of federal tax dollars to local governments and — even more important — determine how many members each state deserves in the House of Representatives.

Plans for the census of 2020 — also known as the decennial census — are now under way. And, accord- ing to a government watchdog group, the planning isn’t going well at all.

Let me show the importance of this in a different way.

One of the very first things the Obama administration did upon taking office in 2009 was to try to have the Census Bureau report directly to the White House.

In addition to the things I just mentioned, the Census Bureau is the keeper of many of Washington’s economic statistics.

And if you control the stats, you control what people are led to believe about the economy.

It was a massive fight that was well covered in the media.

The White House’s effort failed. But the 2010 decennial census was that important to former President Barack Obama. So what’s going on this time? The Census Bureau is trying to save money on the 2020 survey, which cost the government about $13 billion to conduct in 2010. Estimates for the 2020 survey are nearly $18 billion if the survey is done the same way it was in 2010.

As I’ve written before, the bureau thinks it can get costs down to $12.5 billion “by implementing a number of innovations.” That’s where it gets tricky because the Commerce Department’s Office of Inspector General, which controls Census, doesn’t believe those numbers.

And Carol Rice, assistant inspector general for economic and statistical program assessment, said as much in a report she issued two weeks ago.

The big problem, Rice wrote in the March 16 report, is that the Census Bureau seems to be underestimating the cost of follow-up interviews when it can’t catch people in their homes the first, second, third, fourth, fifth or sixth time bureau workers try.

“The current cost estimate contains assumptions that underestimate nonresponse follow-up costs,” Rice wrote. Maybe even more crucial, she questioned the quality of the data being gathered and the security with which that information is handled.

“Finally,” she said, “we identified training limitations, which potentially impact the quality and protection of household data collected by enumerators.”

Enumerators are the census workers who go house-to-house collecting data. A few years ago The Post documented an instance in which one of these enumerators was fudg- ing data that went into the nation’s unemployment statistics.

Further investigation found instances of falsification in all six Census offices.

The bureau not only collects economic data but also statistics on crime, education and other important issues.

To save money on the 2020 decennial census, the agency plans to use new methods in canvassing houses, including going door-to-door at times of day when people are likely to be home. It will also guess at details of some people, instead of conducting an interview.

The cost-cutting measures for the 2020 census were startedd under the Obama administration and don’t reflect recent cutbacks to the Commerce Department and Census Bureau budgets announced by Trump.

All of this is happening under a lame duck Census Bureau boss, John Thompson. He wasn’t reappointed by Obama when his contract ran out in December. He can stay in the job for up to a year.

The president might want to carefully consider who he puts in Thompson’s place. The job is that important.

Stock prices rallied nicely on Tuesday after the Dow Jones industrial average fell for eight straight days. What caused the rally? It could have been remarks by Stanley Fischer, vice chairman of the Federal Reserve. He recently said that there would be two more — rather than three more — rate hikes this year. Or it could have been because the Conference Board reported that consumer confidence is sky high, despite Trump’s ratings being in the dumps — an anomaly if ever there was one. It could also have even been because the Republicans, after earlier flubbing health care reform, decided to get right back on the issue. But Tuesday’s rally was probably due more to the fact that we are at the end of the month and also the end of the first quarter, which hasn’t turned out as well as many investors hoped. Money managers always try to boost stocks to spruce up their performance during these periods. The quarter ends Friday, so there are two more days to make nice rallies are possible.