Dollars And Census Budget Cuts, Politics And Special Interests Beset Bureau As 2000 Census Approaches

This might be the age of information, but as the Census Bureau prepares to count the country in the year 2000, it is being squeezed by some who appear most interested in saving money or protecting political interests.

Innovations the bureau hopes to use to improve the quality of its count are under fire in Congress, and the census budget is being trimmed. Critics also are questioning the need for many census questions that have long been used to frame social policies and set business strategies.

Congress must soon begin making decisions on all of this to enable planning for the massive enterprise to go forward.

A full-scale dress rehearsal of the national count is scheduled for March 1998, and the Census Bureau already is working on a $100 million advertising campaign to entice Americans to respond.

Because of the political and economic power of the census data, controversy has long surrounded its collection.

Census information is used to decide everything from the distribution of seats in Congress to how more than $100 billion a year in federal aid is shared, where to build schools and highways, what areas need hospitals and child care centers, and how different groups of Americans are faring - socially and economically.

The latest obstacles come at a crucial point. America’s population is growing rapidly, the economy is becoming far more complex, and the information from the next census will be pivotal to dealing with vital social and economic issues.

Because of all of this, the debate over how to count, what data to collect and how much to spend on the census has never been more contentious.

Among the issues:

The mounting costs of collecting even the most basic information. Some experts have estimated that the 2000 census could cost as much as $5 billion - nearly double the $2.6 billion for the 1990 count - if the Census Bureau attempts to individually identify every American, as it has done in the past.

Lobbying by racial and ethnic minority groups to add a “multiracial” category to the census form.

Growing resistance of many Americans to mailed requests for information. In 1990, only 63 percent of the long and short census forms mailed out were returned - the lowest return rate since 1970. About 500,000 enumerators attempted to track down the missing, but they still missed about 5 million people, census officials estimate.

Continuing complaints from minority groups and the poor that they are being undercounted. The last of the court suits by cities and minorities claiming undercounts in the 1990 census are just now being resolved.

Conservative complaints that past census questions have been too intrusive. For some, census questions symbolize what they see as the “Big Brother” intrusiveness of the federal government.

Some lawmakers have even proposed doing away with the 34-question long form that asks one out of every six families questions about their income and habits of their daily life, such as how people in a household get to work.

That possibility horrifies an array of data users.

“It is ironic that a nation which is investing billions of dollars in systems to link data users in a national information infrastructure is also questioning the utility of collecting the very data that will form a major nucleus of this system,” said Stephen Dienstfrey, president of the Association of Public Data Users, a national group of 200 organizations that produce and use public statistics.

Recent congressional budgets have steadily squeezed Census Bureau resources and capabilities. This year, the bureau received $50 million to help prepare for the 2000 count, an amount $10 million below its request. The amount budgeted for planning in the next fiscal year is $84.1 million, or two-thirds of the bureau’s request.

The Census Bureau hopes to convince Congress that it can answer many of the questions about accuracy with a different kind of count in 2000. Instead of trying to locate every American, the bureau is proposing to actually count 90 percent of the approximately 4,000 people in each census tract and then to use statistical sampling techniques to describe the demographic characteristics of the rest.

“Without sampling, we will be left with a census less accurate than it should be and one that costs more than it needs to,” Census Bureau Director Martha Farnsworth Riche said.

Critics of sampling say it defies the census mandate in the U.S. Constitution. In fact, the Constitution simply says that the count shall be made “in such manner as they (the Congress) shall by Law direct.”

Representatives of minority groups and urban political leaders favor sampling because they think it will help compensate for persistent undercounting of the homeless and other urban poor. Rep. Carrie Meek, D-Fla., has introduced legislation that would explicitly permit sampling at the census tract level.

Business interests including real estate agents, home builders, planning agencies and mortgage bankers also support sampling and continued collection of the detailed household information in the census long form.

Riche said she hoped Congress would resist proposals to eliminate the long form - a move some critics have argued could save $300 million in the next count.

But in a nod to the critics, census officials said they will not query long-form recipients on the source of their water, how many children they ever had, their method of sewage disposal, and the last year they worked. The number of questions will be down from 38 in the 1990 census.

The short form will contain the fewest questions since the 1820 census. The bureau said that most Americans will be asked just six basic demographic questions - name, age, sex, relationship to others in the household, race, Hispanic origin - and one economic question - whether homes are owned or rented.

Reflecting just how hot a political issue the census has become, Riche noted pointedly that every proposed question in the 2000 census was explicitly required by federal law or court order.