The Census Scales Back A Critical Step: Checking Its Own Work

With scores of people displaced because of the coronavirus pandemic and other disasters, the U.S. Census Bureau is facing an especially daunting challenge of meeting its once-a-decade goal of tallying every person living in the country "once, only once and in the right place."

After counting is set to end on Sept. 30, the bureau has about three months to process all of the information it's gathered this year for the once-a-decade, constitutionally mandated head count. "If you want an accurate census, the quality checks are as important as the initial enumeration itself," says former Census Bureau Director Ken Prewitt, who oversaw the 2000 count.

But the last-minute schedule changes the Trump administration directed the bureau to make have left the agency's staff scrambling to decide what quality checks to trim or toss out.

In recent weeks, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, who oversees the bureau, has been pushing bullish claims that the new approach is not "sacrificing quality."

A growing number of former Census Bureau officials and other census advocates, however, are raising the alarm that the truncated time for processing responses is likely to further undermine the accuracy of the data and exacerbate undercounts of people of color, immigrants and other historically undercounted