CENSUS CAUTIOUS THUMBSUP HOW TO

They enlisted Kathleen Styles, chief of 2020 census communications and stakeholder relations at the bureau, for help with explaining the time the bureau needs to run quality checks on all of the information it's collected this year for the census.

CENSUS CAUTIOUS THUMBSUP HOW TO

In April, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross - who oversees the bureau and ultimately directed the agency to truncate the census schedule - asked Congress to push back the census deadlines to ' ensure the completeness and accuracy' of this year's count while the bureau tried to work around the disruptions brought on by COVID-19.Īccording to an email released this weekend, the administration dropped that push by July 20, when the bureau's public position had become so uncertain that its chief financial officer, Ben Page, was not sure how to answer questions from leaders in Congress about whether the agency still needed the reporting deadlines changed.ĭays earlier, bureau officials scrambled to prepare for a July 17 phone call with Ross. National Court Order Keeps Census In Limbo As Counting End Date Looms Two officials told the internal watchdog group they think the now-blocked memorandum President Trump issued on July 21 played a role in the shift of the administration's position on whether census deadlines should be extended. Bureau officials say they felt pressure by mid-July from the Commerce Department to hasten census field operations, according to the inspector general's report. The inquiry has now expanded to include an interview request for Deputy Commerce Secretary Karen Dunn Kelley. The inspector general's inquiry, which was prompted in part by NPR's reporting, also concluded that the decision to shorten the timeline was not made by bureau officials, who said they did not know who ultimately made that call. On Monday, the inspector general's office at the Commerce Department, which oversees the bureau, released a report warning of the risks to the accuracy and completeness of the count from speeding up the census schedule. 'The same should be true of the decennial enumeration, the results of which will impact apportionment, redistricting, funding decisions, legal mandates and regulatory uses of decennial Census data over the next decade.' 'When the weather isn't right, we postpone the launching of rockets into space,' the group of outside experts wrote in their recommendations for the bureau. Last week, the bureau's Census Scientific Advisory Committee unanimously recommended the timeline be extended as the bureau requested to 'ensure a successful completion' in a way that's based on 'scientific and methodological expertise.' National How Trump Officials Cut The 2020 Census Short Amid The Pandemic

Justice Department attorneys say the scheduling problem is for Congress to fix, and so far, while some lawmakers have introduced bills, they have not yet passed any new laws. 31 for reporting to the president those state population totals that are used to reapportion congressional seats among the states. The administration says it is under pressure to meet the current legal deadline of Dec. 30, the revelations come shortly before federal courts are expected to decide whether to order the administration to keep tallying the country's residents through Oct. Shortening that schedule, a draft document dated July 23 warned, 'will result in a census that has fatal data quality flaws that are unacceptable for a Constitutionally-mandated national activity.' Internal emails and memos, which were released this weekend as part of a federal lawsuit in California, show career officials trying to hold the integrity of the once-a-decade count together in the last weeks of July amid mounting pressure from the administration to abandon the extended timeline it had previously approved in response to the coronavirus pandemic. Weeks before the Trump administration announced it was cutting the 2020 census schedule short, career officials at the Census Bureau attempted to send signal flares about how that last-minute decision would lead to 'fatal' data problems with the national head count and the perception of 'politically-manipulated results.'

In July, Ross directed bureau officials to speed up the 2020 census to end counting a month early, on Sept. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, who oversees the Census Bureau, waits for a House Oversight and Reform Committee hearing to begin in Washington, D.C., in 2019.

Census cautious thumbsup