GOP Hocus Pocus in FY 2018 Census Budget
Last Thursday, the House Appropriations Committee voted to increase funding for the U.S. Census Bureau by only $37 million for FY 2018. That’s only a $10 million bump up from the original Trump administration budget request for the next fiscal year.
In its preliminary budget estimates for FY 2018 issued last fall, the Census Bureau said it would need an additional $300+ million for FY 2018 to fund an extensive End-To-End field test of 700,000 targeted households in rural West Virginia, urban Providence, Rhode Island, and suburban Washington state. The field test was intended to test a new IT-focused census and to test internet census-counting techniques for the first time in an extensive setting.
Now, because of budget cuts, the Census Bureau is dropping the West Virginia and Washington state test sites.
To say the least, this puts the 2020 Census in danger of a botched count.
In response, House Democrats on the Appropriations Committee offered an amendment to the spending bill increasing the FY 2018 census budget by more than $300 million to fully fund the 2018 field tests. The amendment was rejected by the committee on a party-line vote with all GOP members voting against the proposal.
Ironically the committee report which accompanies the approved committee FY 2018 budget (and which was written by the House Republicans) calls upon “the Census Bureau to reconsider its proposal to cancel two of the three test sites scheduled for 2018.” Committee member and U.S. Representative Grace Meng (D-NY) noted the report calls for something that the Appropriations Committee had just cut, funds necessary to implement its own budget!
The New York Times comments on these developments and others in an editorial today.
Meanwhile, the Los Angeles Times published an op-ed detailing the effects on California of a failed 2020 Census.
The Census Project 