My blogs on the apparent White House intention to direct the 2010 Census from inside the West Wing attracted the attention of other blogs, while today's article by John Fund in the Wall Street Journal has led to a small flood of interest. I have been invited to appear on Fox News tomorrow morning and, apparently, some radio talk shows after that. Several additional commentators are picking up the theme.
This issue may have a long life unless the Obama Administration has enough sense to lay down some assurances soon. It is beginning to dawn on people that monkeying with the input assumptions of the Decennial Census could throw off all the other statistical indices of the country. That is what happens in countries that put their census to the service of politics.
The new, fallback position that West Wing officials merely would "work with" the Bureau in setting up the Decennial Census of 2010 (one that is already is set up and is in test phase), and that there is some "precedent" for White House involvement in directing the Census Bureau, as White House Spokesman Robert Gibbs has said, doesn't hold up to scrutiny. I have known most of the Census Directors since JFK's time and none had to go to the White House for directions on how to set up the census. Some did have to account to the White House for reports of unacceptable delays or cost overruns. (But that sort of thing is really an OMB concern more than a West Wing concern.) Most of the time, directors were going through two levels of Commerce Department bureaucracy just to try to get the President to even notice the Census Bureau. Usually they were in line to plead for more resources. Some, like Dick Scammon (under Kennedy, and I, under Reagan) provided briefings of the President and his staff about the results of the Census--to help interpret the data a year or so after the Census was conducted.
But if any White House staff had suggested that they would like a personal hand in shaping the statistical assumptions going into conduct of the Decennial Census, alarms would have sounded in Suitland, Maryland, the Bureau's suburban headquarters. Statisticians are fairly mild mannered people until they think someone is trying to jimmy the numbers.
When I left the Census I went to work for the White House as a Deputy Assistant to the President, heading the office on Planning and Evaluation. Among other things, I enjoyed telling new colleagues and media people how to make more extensive use of the cornucopia of information that is available from the Census Bureau. The Bureau staff really appreciate the chance to share their data--with anyone--and a wise president will make ample use of the solid facts they can provide. That is the way to "work with" the Bureau. But the statisticians know best how to get the data in the first place.
