Interview transcript:

 

Terry Gerton You have done some recent research that connects in very detailed ways the accuracy of census data to federal funding programs. Walk us through the high points and what’s at stake now as we look to 2030.

Sean Moulton Everyone knows that every 10 years we do a full census of the entire population here in the United States. And we’ve done it really since the founding of the country. But it’s not just an academic exercise just to figure out how many people are in each state or anything like that. We use that data in a very robust way. One of those ways is helping to guide our federal funding. What we’ve been looking into is, how much funding are we talking about that gets guided by the census? And what we found is 371 federal assistance programs that we can connect to census data in terms of guidance. And it gets guided in a number of ways. There’s some very simple ways where the census data can be, say, an on-off switch. The easiest example of this is funds maybe going to a rural area, or funds for an urban area. Urban-rural designation is entirely based on the number of people you have. You don’t have many people, population density is low, then you’re rural. That’s all there is to it. And so that census data getting that accurate can turn on or off money going to those types of areas. And there’s formulas where different pieces of census data go into an exact formula that figures out how much your area, your state, your county, your city or something like that might get. If you get the census data wrong, it could impact how much money’s coming to your area. A third area is a little bit more nebulous, but it’s definitely something we can track. Some programs accept applications and they can score and evaluate those applications on a variety of criteria, but they’re always transparent about it. And sometimes census data can come into play. Maybe the program is really geared and they want to help lower income areas or areas with historically disadvantaged communities. And so census data can be used to determine that, and your application might get extra points. And then the last way is for some of our loan programs, census data can even influence the interest rate that you might have to pay back. So it can affect how much money gets out and then how much you have to paid back. And these 371 programs, they accounted for $2.2 trillion in a single fiscal year, just one year.

Terry Gerton Was there anything about the 2020 Census or recent funding formulas that raised flags for you, that you want to make sure get addressed before we get to 2030?

Sean Moulton Every census, problems happen. It’s a huge endeavor, trying to count everyone in the country, at the same time, exactly where they are. We always have errors. But 2020 was one of the first years we did a lot more digital records. We were using what’s called administrative records to try and fill in some gaps from non-responses. And so we really need to address those. There are also a number of states that had statistically significant undercounts or overcounts, and those are particularly troubling. We need states and locations, especially in the areas that had previous undercounts, to make more of an effort in the run up to 2030 to make sure they get the count right.

Terry Gerton I’m speaking with Sean Moulton. He’s a senior policy analyst at the Project on Government Oversight. Let’s dig into those undercounts a little bit. Are there communities that are most vulnerable to being undercounted? And when they are undercounted, what is the impact?

Sean Moulton There are, and Census Bureau knows this and has made efforts over the years to do better outreach to what they call hard-to-count communities, or historically hard-to-count, communities. And these are lower income communities, because of the digital divide; these are rural communities; these are renters. Children are hard to count for some reason; even though the parents are filling out the forms, they might not include their children for some reason. Maybe they don’t understand it applies to everybody. Non-English speakers, not primary English speakers, sometimes they don’t understand the forms or understand the necessity to respond. So there’s a lot of different groups that are harder than the average citizen, we’ll say, to get those responses back from. This is where states and cities and counties can do a better job of reaching out and making sure their community members know the importance of the census, not just as a legal activity, but as something that helps the community and then responds.

Terry Gerton The census is supposed to count every single person, right? Citizens and non-citizens. We had the addition of a citizenship question in 2020. Certainly we’ve had a lot of focus under the Trump administration on citizenship. What impact do you think that’s going to have leading into the 2030 count?

Sean Moulton So in 2020, we had an attempt to add a citizenship question, and it went all the way to the Supreme Court and they tossed it out on a procedural issue. They said, it’s a question you can ask. It’s been in the census before, but they did it in the wrong way, their process was wrong, flawed. So we may be seeing another fight over that. The real problem with the citizenship question is there’s not much evidence that it’s going to give us anything of importance. More importantly, a lot of what we use the census for, it doesn’t matter if you’re a citizen. The funding for hospitals or healthcare or roads — the roads don’t care if you are a citizen and driving on them, or if you a non-citizen and driving them, and we need to repair the roads based on the wear and tear and how many people are there. The same for mass transit and other things. We’re funding for everyone. And so, if we try and narrow our ask to citizens, we’re going to get our allocations of funds wrong, and citizens will then be also penalized. They’ll have roads that aren’t being repaired fast enough and they’ll have problems getting into emergency rooms and what have you. Citizens will also be affected because they will encounter the problems that the low funding leads to: poor maintenance on the roads, longer wait times for their health care. And so even though they may think this is about citizens/non-citizens, everyone’s affected when the funding gets impacted.

Terry Gerton Do you have a sense that members of Congress understand this connection? I mean, at the core, one of their jobs is to bring home money to their districts. If the census count is accurate, the better their funding will be. And yet, do you think they really understand the importance of the accuracy here?

Sean Moulton I don’t. You know, it is pretty buried. We had to do a lot of research to figure out the extent of this. And I can tell you that just a few years ago, the Census Bureau used to do a report somewhat along these lines, and their number was much, much lower. It’s only been in recent years that we’ve kind of expanded our understanding to realize just how important the Census Bureau numbers are in terms of guiding federal funds.

Terry Gerton Are there steps that Congress or the Census Bureau should take now to improve accuracy coming into the 2030 census? I mean, five years seems like a long way off, but Census is already getting ready.

Sean Moulton  A lot of people don’t realize there’s a lot that happens in between those 10 years, but right now probably one of the biggest things would be to get ready to participate in what’s called LUCA, Local Update of Census Addresses. And this is a process that the Census Bureau runs in the run-up to every decennial census where they reach out and they try and get participation of local officials — county, city, state — to update the addresses they have. And an interesting fact is, if the Census Bureau doesn’t have your address, then it doesn’t matter if you fill out the form or not. You can’t be counted. The address comes before the household’s response. And so if somehow you’re living in a recently refurbished apartment over a garage and the post office doesn’t have that address officially on file as a new residence, then you’re not going to get counted. And so we really need to update those addresses and keep them as up-to-date as possible because it’s the first step to getting the responses back.

Terry Gerton Just to wrap up sort of on a more systematic note, is having this much federal funding dependent on the census the best way to go forward? Are there other funding formulas that we should use? Maybe even, wrong, it is the best source of data that we have.

Sean Moulton It is. Obviously, there’s other funding formulas that get used; 371 is not the majority of federal programs out there. But when you’re talking about trying to assist individuals and households, then the census data really can help us find those households and say, inside a state or inside a city, how much should they get? And we’re going to use data to help drive and allocate those rather than simply dividing it up into one-fiftieth and every state gets that amount. It doesn’t make any sense. If one state needs more, it should get more, and the census data, while we’ve had our problems, is still a very accurate number based on getting a lot of the money allocated. We get some things wrong and we’re always trying to improve that, but it’s still an incredibly useful tool for the federal government and for private individuals. Corporations use a lot of census data to figure out where they’re going to put their next grocery store or what have you. That’s because it has proven to be such a reliable tool to help guide those kinds of decisions.

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