Census Bureau Is Losing Authority to Adjust the 2000 Count

The Bush administration said Friday that it is revoking the census director’s power to interpret final results of the 2000 census, a step likely to help Republicans when legislative district lines are drawn and $200 billion a year in federal funds is disbursed.

The move is a strong signal that the administration will rely on the original numbers gathered by mail and door-to-door interviews last year to determine the U.S. population.

Members of minority groups are more likely than whites to be missed during the census count and the government conducted a second, post-census survey to determine the number of people who had been overlooked. There are two sets of numbers that can be used, the original and an adjusted version that includes projections of those missed in the initial count.

Republicans favor the original, unadjusted numbers. Democrats and minority organizations, whose members tend to vote Democratic, want the statistically adjusted figures to be used.

The designation of the official census numbers will not become final until March. The policy the administration canceled Friday was adopted under former President Clinton and would have permitted the census director to decide which set of numbers should become the universally accepted, detailed measure of the nation’s population.

The estimated net undercount is 3.3 million people who were not tallied when the Census Bureau last year put the U.S. population at 281 million. The decision that has prompted controversy is whether the original numbers should be changed to include those 3.3 million people and determine where they live.

“Accountability is the cornerstone of America’s participatory democracy,” Commerce Secretary Don Evans said in a statement. “Our leaders must be accountable to the people. I believe the decision-making authority for the 2000 census should reside with the person selected by the president, approved by the U.S. Senate and accountable to the people.”

The Justice Department provided a legal opinion that the Commerce Department had the power to revoke the authority given to the census director to make the final decision on adjusted figures. The adjusted numbers are gathered by a process called “sampling,” a survey of 300,000 households conducted after the regular census.

A board of statisticians at the Census Bureau will recommend by Feb. 28 whether to use the figures gathered by sampling, and Evans will make his final decision by March 5. Then a flood of census data on the U.S. population and its racial and ethnic breakdowns will be issued for each state. Federal law requires all the results to be available by April 1, so states can prepare new district lines for seats in Congress and seats in state legislatures and city and county governments.

Reaction to Evans’ decision broke along party lines, with Republicans pleased and Democrats dismayed.

“I agree 100% with Secretary Evans’ decision to revoke the illegal rules that attempted to bypass the Congress,” said Rep. Dan Miller (R-Fla.), chairman of the census subcommittee of the House Government Reform Committee. “The decision to adjust or not to adjust the census is a complex one that has far-reaching legal, constitutional and public policy ramifications. That is why Congress gave that authority solely to the Commerce secretary, a member of the president’s Cabinet,” said Miller.

From the Democratic viewpoint, the Bush administration has given priority to “politics over people,” said Rep. Carolyn B. Maloney (D-N.Y.), a member of the subcommittee. “We know what the undercount is, and the president has taken away from the professionals the decision whether or not to correct for the undercount.”

The Commerce secretary’s action “is a sign of the direction they intend to take,” said Brian Komar, policy associate with the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, an umbrella organization for civil rights groups.

If Evans uses his power next month to overrule the recommendations of the Census Bureau statisticians, “it would mark a triumph of politics over fairness and would not serve the nation well,” Komar said. “The president’s slogan of ‘leave no child behind’ would mean: except those children the government is unwilling to count.”