Home PublicationsCommentary Politicizing Census Puts Crucial Data at Risk

Politicizing Census Puts Crucial Data at Risk

by Daniel Castro
by
Pedestrians

One of the U.S. government’s most important tasks is conducting the decennial Census in which it attempts to count every person in the United States. This is a monumental undertaking: In 2010, U.S. Census Bureau workers sent out questionnaires to 120 million households by mail, hand-delivered 12 million questionnaires in rural locations or those affected by natural disasters, and went door-to-door to nearly 47 million households that did not send back their responses. All told, the last Census was the largest mobilization of a civilian workforce by the federal government in history and cost approximately $13 billion. With so much at stake, it is important to get this right. Unfortunately, a draft executive order, if enacted, would politicize the 2020 census, thereby jeopardizing the integrity of its results and driving up costs for taxpayers. The draft executive order would direct the Census Bureau to include questions about immigration status in the decennial census, an idea that Republican members of Congress previously proposed before the 2010 Census.

Read the full article in The Hill

Image: Oran Viriyincy.

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