Still No Census, No Feeling

I’m glad I could work in that Three Stooges reference again (this appeared on the New York Times Editorial page on Tuesday).

I’ll let the Times’ description of this utterly unbelievable circumstance (but predictable for Bushco) speak for itself.

Last November, the director of the Census Bureau, C. Louis Kincannon, and the deputy director, Hermann Habermann, abruptly decided to quit, acknowledging tensions with their bosses in the Bush administration but giving no other details. Both men are statisticians who had served in their positions since 2002 and, before that, had decades of experience as civil servants.

The leadership problems – on top of severe budget cuts – threaten to throw the preparations for the 2010 census into disarray. At stake is the accuracy of the next count and, with it, the legitimacy of important decisions that are rooted in the census, including the drawing of electoral districts and the allocation of government resources.

Various steps must be taken now to ensure an accurate count, starting with an investigation by the committees that oversee the bureau – Oversight and Government Reform in the House, and Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs in the Senate – into why the men quit. This will clear up a distracting mystery and is necessary to ensure that the new directors do not confront the same obstacles.

Equally important, the appropriations committees in the House and Senate must quickly act to restore the roughly $50 million cut by the previous Congress from President Bush’s 2007 budget request for the bureau. Otherwise, the agency may have to forgo using hand-held computers for the next census, relying instead on paper and pencil, which is less accurate and would probably be more expensive in the long run because of its inefficiency.

An alternative and equally unacceptable way to cut costs would be to delay the economic census, which is currently conducted every five years and which serves as the benchmark for dozens of other government surveys, including reports on inflation, construction activity and retail sales.

Carlos Gutierrez, the secretary of commerce, should be pounding the tables in Congress to get this money; failure to do so would suggest that the administration is trying to undermine the census. For his part, Mr. Bush must swiftly nominate a new director – a nonpartisan, professional statistician with solid management experience.

Mr. Kincannon has graciously agreed to remain until his replacement is confirmed, but moving forward requires a new director. For the deputy director position, administration officials must resist any temptation to make a political appointment and should choose instead a top-notch statistician from the bureau’s career ranks.

I applaud the Times for bringing attention to this mundane but highly important issue, but to think that this administration would do anything without political considerations is as realistic as asking the paper to hire back Jayson Blair as managing editor.