Census director resigns amid turmoil over funding ’20 count

WASHINGTON — The director of the U.S. Census Bureau is resigning, leaving the agency leaderless at a time when it faces a crisis over funding for the 2020 decennial count of the U.S. population and beyond.

John Thompson, who has served as director since 2013 and worked for the bureau for 27 years prior to that, will leave on June 30, the Commerce Department announced Tuesday.

The news, which surprised census experts, follows an April congressional budget allocation for the census that critics say is woefully inadequate, and comes less than a week after a prickly hearing at which Thompson told lawmakers that cost estimates for a new electronic data collection system had risen by nearly 50 percent.

The decennial count typically requires a massive ramp-up in spending in the years immediately preceding it, involving extensive testing, hiring and publicity.

However, in late April Congress approved only $1.47 billion for the Census bureau in the 2017 fiscal year, around 10 percent below what the Obama administration requested. And experts say the White House’s proposed budget for 2018, $1.5 billion, is below what is needed.

Compounding the problem, the bureau had hoped to implement a new system that relies more heavily on electronic data collection than in the past. That plan was announced after Congress told the bureau that the cost of the 2020 count could not exceed the cost of the 2010 count.

The 2010 count was most expensive Census ever, costing $13 billion over 10 years. To carry out a similar operation now would cost $17.8 billion.