Federal officials want to move the 2020 decennial headcount of Americans into the digital age by allowing millions of people in politically sensitive groups to respond on the Internet but a congressional watchdog said Monday that the cost and benefit estimates of the U.S. Census Bureau likely aren’t worth the computer paper on which they’re printed.
“The bureau’s preliminary estimated costs of about $73 million for the Internet response option are not reliable because its estimate did not conform to best practices. For example, the estimate has not been updated to reflect significant changes related to the Internet response option that have occurred since it was developed in 2011,” the Government Accountability Office said in a report Monday.
“Additionally, the unreliability of the bureau’s cost estimate for the Internet response option cast doubt on the reliability of associated potential cost savings estimates,” the accountability report said.
Census officials admit their cost and savings estimates are out-of-date and need updating, but the accountability report pointed to multiple reasons to doubt new cost and savings projections can be done in time to be available for the 2020 Census.
“Key questions related to estimating the Internet self-response rate and determining the information technology infrastructure needed to support it may not be answered in time for the preliminary design decision, scheduled for September 2015,” the accountability report said.
In fact, Census officials are so far behind in figuring out the methodologies needed to make the Internet response option workable, the report said, that “bureau officials do not know when the methodologies will be established or when project plans will be updated or created to reflect this new work.”
A second major problem casting doubt on the feasibility, according to the accountability report, is the inability to project a reasonable decision-making schedule for integrating cloud computing capabilities with the Internet response option, particularly with regard to “selecting, testing, and implementing a cloud environment that meets the bureau’s scalability, budget, security, and privacy needs,” the accountability office said.
The groups Census Bureau officials are most interested in reaching via the Internet response option are minorities, renters,children, low-income households, and low-education households, all of which are historically difficult to count accurately.
Democrats and Republicans in Congress have debated the merits of allowing census-takers to use statistical projections for such groups, but federal assistance programs determine funding on the basis of population data, so officials want the most accurate data possible.
The Constitution also requires the decennial census to be an actual count, not a statistical projection. That requirement becomes especially important for officials in both political parties because congressional redistricting must use Census Bureau population data.
Go here for the full GAO report.
Mark Tapscott is executive editor of the Washington Examiner.
