Starting Thursday, tens of millions of Americans will receive letters asking them to go online, pick up a phone, or grab a pen to fill out a questionnaire about who they are and where they live. This mass mailing, which should reach every US household by March 20, is the first major step of the 2020 United States Census.
The decennial census is supremely important, to put it mildly. It’s not just the count that determines how the American people are represented in Congress (the bit that justifies its place in Article 1, Section 2 of the Constitution). It informs how businesses make myriad decisions and how civil rights laws are enforced. “It’s really the gold standard as a population frame upon which all surveys are taken,” says William Frey, a demographer and sociologist at the Brookings Institution. And it provides data that, in 2017 alone, was used to distribute some $1.5 trillion via 316 federal spending programs, according to research from the George Washington Institute of Public Policy at George Washington University.
But there are reasons to worry about the government’s ability to accurately tally up the population this year. The Census Bureau faces “a set of unprecedented factors that could threaten a successful census,” says Terri Ann Lowenthal, the former staff director of the House Census Oversight Subcommittee. Those already included funding, political, and operational stressors. Now the alarming spread of the novel coronavirus—which the World Health Organization has officially deemed a pandemic—could make things even worse. And when the census falls short, it’s chiefly minorities and low-income Americans who lose out.
The census actually began in January in remote stretches of Alaska, where travel gets tricky after spring weather thaws the ground and locals leave their villages to fish and hunt. But this week marks the national start of the process, and the first time Americans can fill out the questionnaire online or by phone. About four-fifths of US households will get letters with instructions for how to do that. The rest—those in areas with poor internet access and low response rates in the 2010 census—will be sent the trusty old paper version. (Everyone can fill out the form in any format they like.) To count those who don’t send in responses by the end of April, the Census Bureau will in mid-May begin to send out enumerators, the folks who go door to door collecting data from the nonresponders. Once it has counted everyone it can, the bureau synthesizes the data and issues its report to the president by the end of the year.
A variety of factors already threaten to undermine the count. Over the past decade, funding from Congress has been unpredictable and below what the bureau has requested. Former bureau director John H. Thompson, who resigned in 2017, pegs the shortfall at more than $200 million. That helps explain why the census is staffing half as many regional and local offices as it did in 2010 (the shift to online responses should alleviate the need for people on the ground). More important, after announcing plans to run three end-to-end tests of the data-collection process—a sort of dress rehearsal for the real thing—the bureau ran just one. The result is less reliable intel on how the real deal will go, and what sorts of problems might crop up. “They’re already up against it,” Thompson says.
Other risks for a thorough count include lingering concerns over the Trump administration’s attempt to ask respondents whether they are US citizens and other anti-immigrant policies, which could discourage people from responding. “There is a climate of fear in some communities,” Lowenthal says. Meanwhile, climate change is fueling natural disasters, like fires and hurricanes, that displace people from their homes, making them harder to find and count.