When will the Census Bureau enter the 21st Century—or even the 20th?
It’s time to take the constitutionally mandated census once again. But while the rest of the country gathers and processes information with the speed of light, the Census Bureau still operates at the speed of shoes, where few, if any, technological tools exist to streamline the process. And they seem uninterested in improving their processes.
This is a recurring theme in government: the misapplication of government interest in technology.
The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) pushed for years to create a means for taxpayers to file their taxes online, even though the private market had created Turbotax, a popular and successful tool for individuals to file their taxes. Government plowed ahead and created an ability to file, but only because of an agreement with Intuit. Reneging on the agreement might have run the company out of business.
Right now over at the Federal Communications Commission, despite a very successful private sector rollout of broadband across the country, bureaucrats are meddling in the marketplace at Congress’s demand, seemingly to try to transform it into some bureaucratic vision of a communications utopia that would not even be a marginal improvement over the status quo.
So who’s surprised that a recent Department of Commerce inspector general report explains that the Census Bureau is wasting money—with more waste on the way?
How is that money being spent? In part, to pay people to walk neighborhoods to “update government maps”—even while Google Maps seems pretty handy.
A great deal of money will be spent mailing pages and pages of census forms to citizens to be filled in with a number 2 pencil. If you can file your taxes with the IRS using electronic forms, couldn’t a similar interface be used for the census, greatly reducing the need for mailing forms?
Clearly past administrations failed to prepare adequately, so the Obama administration should be making plans now to transform the Census Bureau. Surely, 10 years from now, the Census Bureau will have thought of more innovative ways to spend their budget than on a commercial during Super Bowl LIV.