The White House issued its Fiscal Year 2024 (FY 2024) budget on March 9, 2023, including $1.606 billion for the Census Bureau — a $121 million increase from the $1.485 billion appropriated in FY 2023.
The President’s FY 2024 budget requests $375,673,000 for Current Surveys and Programs (a $45 million increase from FY 2023) and $1,230,331,000 for Periodic Censuses and Programs (a $75 million increase from FY 2023).
The Census Bureau’s detailed budget submission to Congress is here.
The Census Project will issue its FY 2024 funding request shortly, recommending that the Census Bureau receive $2 billion ($394 million more than the President’s request, and a $521 million increase from FY 2023) to support 2030 Census preparations, pursue necessary technical innovations, expand programs like the Population Estimates, and enhance surveys, especially the American Community Survey (ACS) (informed by the ACS: America’s Data at Risk report).
The FY 2024 request for the Current Surveys and Programs account highlights:
- Current Economic Statistics: $249 million in FY 2024 (an increase of $28 million from FY 2023), including:
- A “new program designed to measure the production of advanced and emerging technologies by U.S. businesses.”
- Expansion of “the Post-Secondary Employment Outcomes Program, which provides data on earnings and employment outcomes for college and university graduates by degree level, degree major, and post-secondary institution.”
- A new “annual Puerto Rico Economic Survey and a monthly/quarterly economic indicator collection for Puerto Rico.”
- Current Demographic Statistics: $127 million in FY 2024 (an increase of $18 million) to:
- Establish and maintain “an infrastructure that supports improvements to intercensal population estimates, including improvements to the estimates base used to develop the annual population estimates.”
- Formalize “a pilot program to re-use administrative records to improve measurement of health care characteristics and advance the nation’s understanding of population health.”
- In-source “an initiative to design, build, and maintain an online panel to support collection of data for production and research purposes,” formerly known as the Ask U.S. Panel, which was criticized in a recent Inspector General final report.
- Research “innovative approaches to generating estimates about smaller population groups for the Current Population Survey” and “formalizing the Community Resilience Estimates program.”
- State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP): $19 million in FY 2024 (same as FY 2023). “Mandatory appropriations are provided by the Medicare, Medicaid, and State Children’s Health Insurance Program Balanced Budget Refinement Act of 1999 … to support data collection by the Current Population Survey (CPS) on the number of low-income children who do not have health insurance coverage. Data from this enhanced survey are used in the formula to allocate funds to States under the SCHIP program.”
The FY 2024 request for the Periodic Censuses and Programs account highlights:
- Periodic Economic Programs: $166 million in FY 2024 (a decrease of $24 million from FY 2023), including the Economic Census and the Census of Governments:
- Data collection for the Economic Census, plus “follow-up activities to increase response, complete data collection, complete the process that captures company changes to update the master list of businesses, perform micro and macro analytical data review, and release “first look” national industry data.”
- 2030 Census: $408.9 million, which is $160.1M over the FY 2023 funding level.
- American Community Survey: $259.8 million, which is $9 million over the program’s FY 2023 funding level
- “In 2024, entering the third year of its program lifecycle, the 2030 Census will approach its first major milestone, the selection of an operational design. Building on successful innovations implemented for the 2020 Census, the Census Bureau is researching ways to further enhance the program’s design.”“The American Community Survey (ACS) will continue efforts begun in 2023 to construct better question-wording on sexual orientation and gender identity topics.”
- The ACS will also “continue to provide a testbed for innovative survey and data processing techniques that can be used across the Bureau.”
- Geographic Support: $115 million in FY 2024 (a decrease of $1 million from FY 2023).
- Enterprise Data Collection & Dissemination Systems: $280 million in FY 2024 (an increase of $54 million from FY 2023) supporting “major data collection, processing, and dissemination systems and associated research for the Census Bureau’s programs,” including:
- Onboarding programs into the new dissemination system.
- Integrating the “Enterprise Data Lake (EDL) with the Data Collection and Ingest for the Enterprise (DICE) programs. The DICE program will deploy functionality in support of several demographic and economic surveys and provide operational support for use of the DICE systems. It will also begin developing functionality to support onboarding additional surveys in subsequent years. Finally, the program will expand the use of ingest capabilities for third-party and administrative data.”
- Implementing the Evidence Act “to increase research at the Census Bureau, support more complex, multi-agency, large dataset projects, and bring new types of researchers to the Census Bureau, including those new to research and in need of mentoring, and an initiative to improve the Census Bureau’s ability to measure the impact of the environment and natural disasters on people and economy.”
- Advancing “software engineering and data science applications at the Census Bureau” and continuing “research on improving data collection methods.”
The President’s budget anticipates a drop in full-time employees (FTEs) at the Census Bureau from 2,926 in FY 2023 to only 2,477 in FY 2024.
The Census Project 