2020 census draws concern of experts

Underfunding, cost overruns could lead to a faulty head count

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.

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.

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. 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.

The bureau 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 should reach more households more efficiently than mailed forms. The goal is to rein in the ballooning cost of censuses. Congress has regularly given the agency less money than it said was needed — $200 million less through fiscal 2017.

Suggestions by President Donald Trump and others that the census include a question about citizenship or immigration status are especially worrying to many. More than 11 million unauthorized immigrants lived in the United States in 2016, 8 million of them in the civilian workforce.