California has spent by far the most of any state to achieve an accurate population count in the 2020 U.S. Census. Some fear even that will not be enough.
To pay for media campaigns and hire workers in efforts to maximize its count, California approved $100 million in the 2017-18 fiscal year budget and Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom has proposed another $54 million in this year’s budget to bolster efforts at reaching people who are hard to count.
At stake for all states is an estimated $880 billion in annual federal funding from 300 programs that use census data to distribute funds, seats in the U.S. House of Representatives and accurate redistricting of congressional districts. States receive federal funding for Medicaid, food stamps, highway construction and school lunches based on census data.
The next biggest spenders are New York with $20 million and Washington with $16 million, according to Wendy Underhill, who monitors state census preparations for the National Conference of State Legislatures. Illinois has discussed appropriating as much as $83 million, but has only approved $2 million so far, she said.
“Findings from our new report show that Census 2020 is in serious peril,” said California Secretary of State Alex Padilla, who was in Washington D.C., Wednesday to present the findings
A shift to online counts, a potential question about U.S. citizenship, language barriers and underfunding at the federal level are combining to potentially make the 2020 census inaccurate and incomplete, according to Padilla's commission.
An inaccurate count would make political representation less democratic, misdirect the flow of federal funding, and force businesses, policymakers, scientists and the country to rely on erroneous population data over the next decade, Padilla said.
The federal government employs workers to conduct the actual counts, but the states conduct awareness efforts to reach hard-to-count populations and assuage the fears of people reluctant to become a federal statistic. States can also do their own assessments and challenge the federal numbers if they believe they are inaccurate.
“In every state there are hard-to-count populations,” Underhill said. “That includes immigrants, homeless people, rural residents, children under the age of five and people with a language barrier.”
The states that invest the most tend to be those in danger of losing a member of Congress, because the 435 seats in the House of Representatives are divided among the state’s based on population, Underhill said. California and Alabama are among the state’s that could lose a seat.
After the 2010 Census, Oregon, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, Texas, Florida, South Carolina and Georgia gained seats; Iowa, Missouri, Illinois, Michigan, Louisiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey and Massachusetts lost seats.
Underhill said the seats in Congress are secondary to the potential loss of federal funds.
The commission held hearings in Los Angeles, New York, San Antonio, Texas, Orlando, Florida, and Columbus, Ohio, to weigh the impact of the Trump administration's policies on the census. Testimony came from dozens of public officials, community organizers and others familiar with the challenges with hard-to-count communities.
Leaders of states with hard-to-count populations fear the Trump administration’s plan to ask residents if they are a U.S. citizen as part of the 2020 census could vastly lower participation results. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross added the citizen's question to the census in March 2018, drawing lawsuits from several states, including California, and civil rights activists.
State leaders believe the point of the question is to intimidate immigrants, documented or otherwise, into avoiding being counted by the Census, particularly given their
Two federal rulings have been made in favor of state lawsuits. Last month the case went to the U.S. Supreme Court, which is expected to hear the matter in June.
California, which has been at loggerheads with the Trump administration on many issues, spent only $12 million on the 2010 census, of which roughly $10 million came from private industry, and $25 million in 2000.
Next month, the U.S. Census Bureau plans to field test a 2020 census form that includes the controversial citizenship question. The test is supposed to assess how that question might affect responses to the national head count on April 1, 2020. The field test will go to 480,000 households with some receiving a form with the additional question asking if the person is a citizen of the United States.
Los Angeles has the dubious distinction of being the region with the hardest to count population, said Cecil Flournoy, a Los Angeles-based program manager for California Complete Count, who spoke at the Government Finance Officers Association conference in L.A. on Monday.
Ten of the nation’s 50 hardest-to-survey counties are in California, Flournoy said.
Ditas Katague, director of California Complete Count, told the commission that in 1990 an undercount of 835,000 in California likely cost the state one seat in the House and over $2.2 billion in federal funding. As the state has 40 million residents, the commission report estimated that the undercount could exceed one million individuals.
In Brooklyn, the most difficult community to count in New York State, previous undercounts have deprived residents of "key infrastructure including schools, healthcare, housing, transportation and government development and community development," Gilford Monrose, Director of Faith Based & Clergy Initiatives for the Office of the Brooklyn Borough President said in his testimony before the commission in New York in November.
In Cook County, Illinois, the nation's second-most-populous, the government received 14 federal grants in 2018 totaling more than $43 million based on census data, Alma Anaya, a county commissioner, said in her testimony at the March 20 hearing in Columbus.
"It is not an exaggeration that an undercount will limit our services and force our operations to adopt in a way that will potentially harm our workforce and the public," Anaya said.
"There are 110,000 plus foreign‐born residents living in my District," Anaya said. "Raids from immigration authorities on the southwest side neighborhoods are now common, and they are very well documented in the media. This leads — this leads me to question how there can be trust to open the doors for other follow‐ups with the census workers."
Anaya said she plans to form a complete count committee and develop partnerships with not-for-profits in her district.
"It is a fine line to walk when you need the public to participate in order to secure resources and you are also trying to assure them of their own safety," she said.
The U.S. population continues to become more diverse, which can create challenges with language barriers, cultural differences and distrust of the government, Jeffrey Enos, deputy director for the U.S. Census Western Region, told the GFOA conference Monday. Roughly $6.7 trillion of federal money will go to state, cities and counties in the coming decade based on census data, Enos said.
“This affects every man, woman and child living in this country — so it’s critical this census count is accurate,” Enos said.
He outlined efforts his region has made to reach residents including hiring 300 partnership specialists to work with community-based organizations and local businesses across the seven-state region. Census forms will be mailed several times in addition to online forms — and if there is no response census takers will make home visits, he said. Across the country, he said, the census will have 6,000 partnership specialists "who will reach out to people in hard-to-count populations," he said.
He emphasized that responding to the census is safe, because employees are subject to prison sentences and fines for breaches of census confidentiality.
