New York Times, March 28, 2018
Here’s Why an Accurate Census Count Is So
Important
By JIM TANKERSLEY and EMILY
BAUMGAERTNERMARCH
27, 2018
The federal government bases a large
amount of its spending decisions, including on highways and low-income
programs, on census data. CreditRich Pedroncelli/Associated Press
WASHINGTON — The United States census
is so much more than just a head count. It is a snapshot of America that
determines how congressional seats are apportioned, how state and federal
dollars are distributed, where businesses choose to ship products and where
they build new stores. To do all that properly, the count needs to be accurate.
The Commerce Department’s decision to restore a citizenship question to
the census beginning in 2020 is prompting concerns about curtailing
participation and possibly undercounting people living in the United States,
particularly immigrants and minority groups who are expressing discomfortwith answering questions
from census workers.
Wilbur Ross, the commerce secretary,
acknowledged concerns about decreased response rates in a memorandum released on Monday night. But he
said asking about citizenship would enhance the results by helping calculate
the percentage of the population eligible to vote.
An undercount of the population would
have far-reaching implications. It could skew the data that are used to
determine how many congressional representatives each state gets and their
representation in state legislatures and local government bodies. It would
shape how billions of dollars a year are allocated, including for schools and
hospitals. It would undermine the integrity of a wide variety of economic data and other statistics that
businesses, researchers and policymakers depend on to make decisions, including
the numbers that underpin the forecasts for Social Securitybeneficiaries.
Here are several of the commercial,
political and research efforts that depend on accurate census data:
Divvying up seats in
Congress, state legislatures and more
The Constitution requires the government to enumerate the
number of people living in the United States every 10 years, and to use that
data to apportion the seats in Congress among the states. The calculation
is based on total resident population —
which means citizens and noncitizens alike — and it generally shifts power
between the states once a decade, in line with population and migration trends.
States including Texas, Florida, Colorado and Oregon are projected to gain seats after the 2020
numbers are in. Illinois, Ohio, New York and West Virginia are among the states
expected to lose seats. An undercount could shift those projections.
Lawmakers also use census data to draw congressional district boundarieswithin
states, an often-controversial process that can help decide partisan control of
the House. Census data also underpin state legislative districts and local
boundaries like City Councils and school boards.
Handing out federal
and state dollars
The federal government bases a large
amount of its spending decisions on census data. Researchers concluded last year that in the 2015
fiscal year, 132 government programs used information from the census to
determine how to allocate more than $675 billion, much of it for programs that
serve lower-income families, including Head Start, Medicare, the Supplemental
Nutrition Assistance Program, Pell grants for college and reduced-price school
lunch programs. Highway spending is also apportioned according to census data.
The calculation for determining
congressional districts is based on total resident population — which means
citizens and noncitizens alike. CreditKiichiro
Sato/Associated Press
Influencing business
decisions
To sell products and services,
companies large and small need good information on the location of potential
customers and how much money they might have to spend. The census provides the
highest-quality and most consistent information on such items, and
businesses have come to depend on it to make
critical choices.
Census data help companies decide where
to locate distribution centers to best serve their customers, where to expand
or locate new stores and where they have the best chance of seeing a high
return on investment. That is why business groups have been particularly
concerned about the integrity of that data.
“The
2020 census is used to help construct many other data products produced by the
federal government,” said Michael R. Strain, an economist at the American
Enterprise Institute who writes frequentlyon the importance of census data
for policymakers and the private sector.
“Some of those products are heavily
used by businesses when determining where to open new stores and expand
operations, or even what items to put on their shelves. This affects retail
businesses, for sure, but businesses in many other sectors as well,” he added.
Planning for various
health and wellness programs
Low response rates from any one
demographic group would undermine the validity of various population-wide
statistics and program planning.
Scientists use census data to
understand the distribution of diseases and health concerns such as cancer and
obesity across the United States population, including drilling down to race
and ethnicity to identify health patterns across demographics. Public health
officials then use the data to target their interventions in at-risk
communities. Inaccurate census data could lead public health officials to invest in
solving a problem that does not exist — or worse, to overlook one that does.
“It’s getting harder to conduct the
census, due to a variety of factors, including increasing cultural &
linguistic diversity, and distrust of the government,” said Diane Whitmore
Schanzenbach, an economist who directs the Institute for Policy Research at
Northwestern University. “The addition of the citizenship question will make
the enumerators’ jobs even harder by heightening privacy concerns and reducing
participation among immigrants, who may fear the information will be used to
harm them or their families.”
Gaming out Social
Security
An undercount in the census could also
impact forecasts about Social Security payouts, which are already increasing as
a share of the federal government’s revenue.
When Congress plans for the costs of
the country’s Social Security needs, lawmakers rely upon demographic projection
about the population’s future: the number of children expected to be born, the
number of people expected to die, and the number of people expected to
immigrate. If baseline data regarding the current population are
inaccurate, future projections could be skewed,
causing financial challenges down the line.
