Stumbling over its multibillion-dollar plans for a high-tech census, the government says it will go back to counting the nation’s 300 million people the old-fashioned way — with paper and pencil…
Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez told Congress his department will scrap plans to use handheld computers to collect information from the millions of Americans who don’t return the census forms that come in the mail.
That’s one of a number of changes that will add as much as $3 billion to the constitutionally mandated 2010 count, pushing the overall cost to more than $14 billion.
This was to be the first truly high-tech count in the nation’s history. The Census Bureau had awarded a contract to purchase 500,000 of the computers, plus the computer operating system, at a cost of more than $600 million. The contract is now projected to balloon to $1.3 billion, even though the bureau will scale back its purchase to only 151,000 computers. The higher expenditure is because of cost overruns and new features ordered by the Census Bureau on the computers and the operating system.The devices, which look like fancy cell phones, will still be used to verify every residential street address in the country, using global positioning system software. But workers going door-to-door will not be able to use them to collect information from the residents who didn’t return their census forms. About a third of U.S. residents are expected not to return the forms…
At one point, the Census Bureau identified more than 400 new or clarified technical requirements for the computer system.
Our 20th Century civil service is supposed to make it into the 21st Century – led by 19th Century ideologues.
This story comes around every 10 years. (HAR!)
So–just more “waste.” $16 per person, man/woman/child-illegals not included.
Given the only rule is “to take a census”==there ought to be some heat seeking satelite system that could just take a snap shot at 200AM and send the photo’s to India to count the blips?
Seriously==why not just some good estimates and call it THE Census? Errors would average out.
I’m surprised they didn’t just give it to Halliburton on a no-bid contract. After all, isn’t taking the census part of the Grand War on Terror?
Everything else in our society is governed that way.
Why should illegal immigrants be counted? Perhaps we should be looking at citizens only.
Hey, hey, hey now, we try to extrapolate our value with big words and requirements in our requests on contracts. It makes us seem important to ourselves and well, thats what its all about don’t you know.
Plus now we all get $6k+ computers, (Celerons rock!) full of the latest technology that allows us to do some email and write reports that get printed. $6k may seem like a lot but its not like we will be counting anyone with them so we were able to cut corners and get them cheap, I remember when computers used to cost tens of thousands of dollars and take up a whole closet. We are getting a deal on these new Celerons!
I’m thinking of going with the extra RAM option for a total of 512MB, more than enough and a great deal for only $500 more per computer. I hear solitaire is multi-player now I wonder how that works, oh well we will have time to figure it out now.
Now where is my pencil? I need to get back to work.
Wait, its Friday never mind I don’t need my pencil.
God forbid that the census bureau use off-the-shelf technology. For that much money they could have gotten a containers full of reliable PDAs from any one of a handful an reputable manufacturers. Then after the census they could have sold them on eBay, or to another country so they could do their census.
Off the top of my head I can think of Palm, Apple Touch, Motorola Q, Blackberry, and Nokia. How hard would it be to crank out some custom software for those platforms?
#7 – Half of us commenting could write the needed s/w for the off shelf PDAs.
Reminds me of a Three Stooges Short when the boys were hired as census takers. Moe started off the questions with, “Are you married, or are you happy?”
The amount of tax money wasted is disgusting. Most people don’t care – it’s all funny money to them.
There is enough data around from drivers licenses, death and birth records, housing, schools, utilities for the bean counters at Washington to conduct a “good enough” census.
Seems like a good use of all those spy computers that Bush put in place. Why not use them to compute an estimate?
Do you suppose our governments data mining efforts are enjoying the same success? It wouldn’t put it past our current administration to spend $100 billion on black “intelligence” projects and get squat in return.
#10 – I think that the word enumeration in the Constitution precludes estimates…
#1 – Seriously==why not just some good estimates and call it THE Census? Errors would average out.
Because Census numbers are what local, state, and federal bureaucracies and legislatures use when budgeting everything. The number of cops on the street… the upgrade path for aging fire fighting equipment… how much to allocate to inoculations for inner city school kids… and everything else.
Comcast isn’t doing that well with the handhelds either, but they are managing.
A big problem with the Census Bureau is mission-creep. They were charged by the Constitution to collect census information in order to allocate representation in Congress.
Now they have to collect data for a million other projects. In addition, the marketing business is just drooling over census data. I can’t help but wonder how many of the questions and work done by the government is really done for corporate America’s marketing departments.
#3 – Angry monkey!
#15 – Ron…
Good point.
This data should be strictly collected and used for purposes that address governmental need and the public good… and it should be freely released and available without reservation because it is collected on the public dime…
But it should be free on any outside influence.
#15 & 17,
It is my understanding that much of the census data is sold to private parties. It doesn’t pay for the census, but helps. The general info is freely available to all though.
I think Bobbo’s idea in #1 using satellite photos might be cheaper.
Agreed. If they just had the short form of the census, it would be easier to get people to respond.
#18 – It is my understanding that much of the census data is sold to private parties.
The census is public domain data. Why would it be “sold”?