The Census Bureau handed a victory to congressional Republicans on Thursday, recommending that the government use the actual results of the 2000 population headcount for the remapping of political districts.
Though the final decision will be made by Commerce Secretary Don Evans, the advisory effectively ends a nasty partisan dispute over whether to adjust the final numbers to make up for the exclusion of millions of people, most of them urban minorities.
Billions of federal dollars are allocated based on census figures, and states draw their congressional and legislative voting districts according to census numbers. Using the adjusted figures likely would have given more money and political power to urban areas, traditional Democratic strongholds.
In a memo to Evans, acting Census Director William Barron said the agency “reached this recommendation because it is unable, based on the data and other information currently available, to conclude that the adjusted data are more accurate for use in redistricting.”
Evans is unlikely to ignore the census officials’ recommendation because it supports the Bush administration’s position on the census. It also strengthens Republican hopes for maintaining control of the U.S. House in the 2002 election.
The decision was a crushing disappointment to congressional Democrats as well as big-city mayors, whose cities likely will get less federal funding as a result.
Jacquelyn Heard, a spokeswoman for Chicago Mayor Richard Daley, said the city believes that “any undercount is unfair because a count determines how much federal aid a city receives for a variety of very important programs.”
Last week, Los Angeles officials sued in federal court to stop Evans from making the final decision on the census numbers, saying he violated regulations by not seeking public comment before taking the authority away from the Census Bureau’s career scientists. New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani said he was considering joining the lawsuit.
According to a report accompanying Barron’s memo, the bureau research tool called the Accuracy and Coverage Evaluation suggested that the 2000 census had a net undercount of 3.3 million people.
The bureau’s other accuracy checking tool, the demographic analysis, indicated that the same census overcounted the national population by 1.8 million people and didn’t accurately reflect undocumented Hispanic immigrants.
Though census officials felt adjusted data would in some ways be more accurate than the unadjusted numbers, the inconsistencies revealed by their own checking tools led them to recommend using the unadjusted numbers.
“These differences cannot be resolved in the time available for the work,” Barron said.
By law, the Census Bureau has until April 1 to deliver the population data to the states for redistricting. But much of the census data needed to fully probe the inconsistencies will not be processed and available to the bureau’s scientists until long after that deadline.
In a statement released by the Commerce Department, Evans thanked the census “professionals for their dedication, diligence and thoroughness. Their report will be a critical element of my deliberations.”
He is expected to make his decision as soon as next week.
The Republican lawmaker who heads the subcommittee with oversight responsibilities for the census was more passionate. Rep. Dan Miller of Florida issued a news release with the headline “Game. Set. Match.”
“This recommendation by the Census Bureau experts should settle the matter once and for all,” Miller said in his statement. “The American people proved you can have a great census using only an actual headcount. The professionals at the Census Bureau have now concluded you can’t make a great census any better by using adjustment.”
The Clinton administration and congressional Democrats had initially pushed to have adjusted census numbers or statistical sampling used for all purposes, including reapportioning House seats, if census officials decided such a modification would provide a more accurate count.
But congressional Republicans sued, saying the Constitution calls for a headcount of each U.S. resident, and the Supreme Court agreed that sampling could not be used for reapportionment.
After taking office, Evans reversed a Clinton order giving the census director the final decision on whether to use adjusted figures, and took the authority himself.
Evans said such authority properly lay with a political appointee answerable to Congress and not the Census Bureau’s acting director, a career civil servant.
“We are very disappointed that the Census Bureau has decided not to correct the errors in the 2000 census within the deadlines it faced,” said a joint statement from House Democratic Leader Richard Gephardt of Missouri and two other senior House Democrats.
“Millions of minorities, children and rural residents were missed while millions of others were miscounted. . . . We hope the Census Bureau did not suffer from inappropriate political pressure. Since the Bush administration took office, the path to this decision has been deeply troubling.”
Former Census Director Kenneth Prewitt, the Clinton appointee who directed the 2000 count, praised his former colleagues.
“I have complete confidence in the scientific integrity and quality of the Census Bureau,” Prewitt said in a phone interview. “They’re professionals. This was a difficult decision. This is rocket science. It’s very complicated, technical stuff.
“I think they did as we had all along said we would do,” Prewitt said. “They pored through the data and made the decision that we would not be able to substantially improve the census with the adjustment process, and therefore they made the right decision.”
Despite the debate, the 2000 census was probably the nation’s most accurate, demographers said Thursday.
For example, a panel of experts determined that the 2000 census missed 1.18 percent of the country’s population, compared with 1.61 percent in 1990.
