Census Bureau Fears Budget Fallout

Proposed Cuts Said to Hurt Preparations for 2010 Count

The Census Bureau's preparations for the 2010 national head count would be dangerously weakened by cuts in House and Senate funding bills to the president's proposed budget, agency officials and their supporters said yesterday.

The White House's proposed 2007 budget asked for $878 million for bureau operations. The House voted late last month to give the agency $815.7 million, and the Senate Appropriations Committee approved a bill this week that includes $828 million for the bureau.

Bureau officials declined to comment on the cuts, but agency advocates said they would threaten the accuracy and cost-effectiveness of the 2010 head count. Among the impacts: The agency would drop plans to use hand-held computers to collect information and would not be able to provide a full picture of residents of group quarters such as prisons, college dormitories and mental hospitals.

"It would be devastating," said Rep. Frank R. Wolf (R-Va.), chairman of the Appropriations subcommittee that funds the census, who promised to convene a hearing late this month "to make the case publicly how important this is."

The reductions in the census budget have become an annual mid-decade battle for the agency, which is part of the Commerce Department. Last year and in 2004, Census Director C. Louis Kincannon said the cuts threatened the viability of the American Community Survey, a monthly household survey that is supposed to replace the long form in 2010.

A Census Bureau assessment sent to congressional offices said the House bill would "have a major impact on the core mission of the Census Bureau" and would "add significant risk of operational or methodological failures that could compromise the coverage accuracy of the results" of the 2010 Census. In contrast to previous years, census officials would not comment on the reductions.

But Kenneth Prewitt, who was Census Bureau director during the 2000 head count, said the cuts would weaken the careful preparations the agency needs to make before conducting its 2010 tally.

"You don't do a rocket launch with a feature that has not been tested," he said. "The census is like that. If you blow it, you cannot recoup in the middle of taking the census."

In the House, where money was taken from census programs on the floor to fund law enforcement grants, Wolf said, "It's not that anyone was against the census. They just wanted their important program."

But members of the Senate Appropriations Committee have a higher level of skepticism about the bureau's needs. The Appropriations subcommittee report on its bill states that the dollars included "are sufficient for the activities that are critical to the agency, including its primary function, the decennial census."

Katie Boyd, a spokesman for Sen. Richard C. Shelby (R-Ala.), chairman of the Appropriations subcommittee that funds the census, said he believes the legislation "strikes an important balance among the needs for all the critical programs funded under this bill."

In a letter to Shelby this week, two dozen individual and group supporters of the Census Bureau pointed out that the law enforcement programs funded at the agency's expense receive money allocated to localities based on census data, and the numbers need to be accurate to make sure the money is spent wisely.

The increased funding to law enforcement is beneficial, but "we do not want that done at the expense of the census budget," said Susan Frederick, senior committee director for the National Conference of State Legislatures, which signed the letter. Other signers included groups representing shopping center developers, racial and ethnic minorities, statistical groups, and local governments.