The Census Bureau's Recent History of Throwing Billions of Dollars Down the Drain

$15 billion. That’s the budget of the 2010 US Census. Where to begin with how it has been misspent? When we look back at the past ten years, we can see how the Census Bureau is an institution in need of major reforms because poor work has been rewarded and PR spinsters have been left running the show to make it seem like everything is hunky-dory.

The 2010 Census is currently in the non-response follow-up (NRFU) stage of operations (to track down individuals who did not mail back their 2010 Census forms on time), which is the largest and most expensive stage of the 2010 Census. 635,000 workers are involved in this operation, and it is the largest peacetime civilian hiring effort in the history of the United States. Yet this operation has been plagued by failure from the get-go. Let’s first take a look at the now infamous handheld computer debacle:

In 2006 the Census Bureau signed a contract with the Florida-based Harris Corporation to design handheld computers (HHCs) that would be used for the 2010 Census. This contract was initially worth $600 million. Yet because of poor directions and incompetence from Census Bureau officials about what they desired and a the failure on on the part of Harris Corp. to determine what specifications the government needed, the designs that were used for this project were flawed from the get-go.

Rather than creating a “fixed price contract,” the government created a “cost-plus contract” that essentially gave the Harris Corp. a blank check to fiddle around as they wished to the tune of $600 million. And, they fiddled and fiddled and fiddled and failed.

So what did the Census Bureau do to correct this problem? They gave the same company an extra $200 million in 2008 and told them to try it again. Ultimately, Harris delivered some handheld computers that were able to be used during the Address Canvassing phase of 2010 Census operations, but employees have repeatedly claimed that these devices were extremely faulty, slow, and at times completely non-functional. (Had the Census Bureau decided to equip its employees with special versions of the Blackberry or I-Phone, such a debacle would have been avoided.)

In April 2009, Vivek Kundra, Obama Administration’s chief information officer, told Congress, “The federal government doesn’t do a good job of defining what the requirements are.” He continued, “By the time you find out the requirements have increased or the budget is out of control, it’s too late to make an adjustment.”

The only positive force that has come out of this failure by Harris Corporation and the Census Bureau is that it has become clear just how lax the rules are for corporations trying to obtain government contracts and how far behind the government is in terms of IT matters, even when the Obama Administration prides itself on its supremacy of technological know-how.

Ultimately, at the eleventh hour, the government chose not to use these shoddy handheld computers for the current non-response follow-up operations, so enumeration is now being done by hand to the cost of $3 billion additional dollars, a figure that Census Bureau Director Robert M. Groves acknowledged at his most recent press conference.

*Note that Australia and even BRAZIL, yes, that large developing nation in South America, are now successfully using the Internet and handheld computers to conduct census operations.

So now the Census Bureau is in the midst of its non-response follow-up operations, it must rely on a “paper-based operations control system” –better known as ancient technology– to enumerate nearly 100 million people. (And guess who is responsible for implementing and maintaining this paper-based operations control system? None other than the Harris Corporation!)

The software that local census offices use to obtain the address lists of individuals who have not mailed back their forms have experienced consistent failures and outages since this stage of operations began. Reports and complaints regularly come in to MyTwoCensus.com from workers who are paid to sit around all day with books and games, as they simply can do no work until the software allows print-outs to be made.

Unfortunately, even Census Bureau Director Robert M. Groves is complicit in creating elaborate cover-ups that have plagued 2010 Census operations. On May 11, he told NextGov that all of the PBOCS problems were fixed, when this wasn’t the case at all, as is evidenced by an e-mail distributed from one of his deputies two days later.

At this stage, the accuracy of the 2010 Census is in major jeopardy, and in the coming days and weeks, I will further elaborate on the (literally) hundreds of different problems that plague the Census Bureau.