Why Census Budget Battle Impacts New Jersey
Posted by Rob Gebeloff October 12, 2007 9:10AM
Categories: Demographics
http://blog.nj.com/statattack/2007/10/w ... impac.html

Not to keep harping on it, but as I've been writing most of this week, New Jersey is in population peril.

Census estimates show the state's population growth has ground to a halt and may even be declining.

Which is why Congressional efforts to slash the Census budget could be bad for New Jersey. These estimates are just estimates -- the 2010 Census is the real deal to determine official population counts for every state, county and town in the nation.

One of the most expensive aspects of running the decennial Census: Counting population groups that are hard to count, such as migrant workers, illegal immigrants, and the poor in general, who tend to be more transient than the affluent.

New Jersey's population currently suffers from a domestic population deficit -- more people are moving to other states than are moving into New Jersey from elsewhere in the U.S. We make up some of it with our healthy birth rate.

But come 2010, New Jersey's hopes of keeping its 13 seats in the House and holding onto all the federal funding that is population based will depend heavily on the Census Bureau's ability to count every single person living here.

It isn't easy. A lot of people assume the Census Bureau can't count hard-to-reach populations because a household full of illegal immigrants with no English skills, say, isn't going to return a Census form.

That's not how the Census works. The Census has an extensive follow-up regime using computer technology and an army of local field workers whose job it is to make sure every household gets a Census form, and that every Census form sent out is accounted for.

If it sounds expensive to run such an operation in every nook and cranny of the U.S., it is.

Part of the problem is that the Census has come under criticism from the General Accounting Office for spending efficiency. But a bigger problem is that the bureau's budget cycle is designed to ramp up and expand substantially as the end of the decade approaches -- which galls those in Congress who want to hold the line on spending across the board.

The Census Project, a coalition of academic, business and government data users, is leading efforts to persuade Congress to give the Census what it wants, and has a collection of letters on its site making the case in detail.

Sen. Tom Coburn from Oklahoma has been one of the leading critics of bureau spending, and when I wrote a longer piece about the issue last year, he didn't return my calls for an interview. (Ok, if you were a Senator, would you return my call?)

But I quoted some of his writings, and he was more than happy to post my article on his site (Coburn is the guy who appears in bold font), if you're interested in more of the back-and-forth on this .