Playing With Numbers

The Reagan Administration’s Office of Management and Budget, which considers itself the watchdog over everything, now seems to be trying to reduce the number of questions that the U.S. Census Bureau wants to ask Americans in 1990. OMB’s excuse was that the longer census form will overburden Americans with paperwork and cost the public considerable valuable time. OMB even estimated the cost of filling out the longer forms, $450 million. How did OMB arrive at that figure? By multiplying the time involved in filling out the form by $15 an hour. By that logic, one critic suggested, a situation comedy on television costs the American economy billions of dollars a year.

Under appeal from the Census Bureau, and under attack from critics like the National League of Cities, OMB now seems willing to use the longer forms in a test run next March. A final decision would be made concerning the 1990 enumeration itself. Better yet, OMB should drop now any thought of meddling with Census Bureau decisions. OMB’s suggestion was that the bureau reduce by about 35 questions the long census form that would be filled out by about one-sixth of the American households, although the proposed 1990 forms are no longer than those used in 1980.

The questions to which OMB objected generally dealt with housing, work and fertility. Most households will get a shorter form with 17 questions. The long forms contain about 70 additional confidential queries seeking more detailed information on what sort of people Americans are, how they work and how they live. Such information gives the United States every decade the single most accurate portrait of itself available. The information is vital to all sectors of society.

Another potential controversy deals with how the Census Bureau will count the people it misses in spite of efforts to get a form, or a census worker, to every household. City officials are particularly interested in an accurate count because the distribution of federal and state aid often is based on census figures. Minorities are concerned because their numbers often are undercounted. The Republican National Committee is against any statistical adjustment in big cities because the numbers might favor Democrats. Census figures are used to redraw legislative and congressional districts to account for population shifts.

The undercount in 1980 was estimated to be as high as 5% for blacks and Latinos, possibly costing big cities millions of dollars in state and federal aid and denying those minorities their proper representation in legislatures and Congress.

The most perverse proposal concerning the census, however, is that of a group known as the Federation for American Immigration Reform, which has threatened to sue if the 1990 census includes any illegal aliens.

The U.S. Constitution directs the census to count persons , and it does not distinguish between citizens and non-citizens, Republicans and Democrats, or blacks and whites. Government and private enterprise rely on the census to make a wide variety of important decisions. Those decisions must be made on the basis of the most accurate count possible of all persons living within the United States at that time.