On January 9, 2020, at 10am, the House Oversight & Reform Committee will hold a hearing to “examine the Census Bureau’s strategies and plans for reaching hard-to-count communities in the 2020 Census.”
The witness list features a series of stakeholders: Vanita Gupta from The Leadership Conference on Civil & Human Rights, John Yang from Asian Americans Advancing Justice, Arturo Vargas from NALEO Educational Fund, Kevin J. Allis from the National Congress of American Indians, and Marc Morial from the National Urban League.
As explained by the committee, they are “very concerned that minority and immigrant communities, as well as rural communities with limited Internet access, are at serious risk of being undercounted in the 2020 Census, jeopardizing their accurate representation in Congress and access to federal funds.” Sadly, the Census Bureau appears to have “fallen behind its own targets for hiring census workers to reach hard-to-count communities and for hiring partnership specialists who serve as critical liaisons with these communities.”
The committee reminded the Bureau of the need to “work closely with local communities to ensure an accurate count,” and that will surely be a big focus of tomorrow’s hearing.
The hearing should be broadcast via the committee website, https://oversight.house.gov/ .
The Census Project 