<DOC>
[106th Congress House Hearings]
[From the U.S. Government Printing Office via GPO Access]
[DOCID: f:71177.wais]
OVERSIGHT OF THE 2000 CENSUS: NON-RESPONSE FOLLOW-UP AND OTHER KEY
CONSIDERATION
=======================================================================
HEARING
before the
SUBCOMMITTEE ON THE CENSUS
of the
COMMITTEE ON
GOVERNMENT REFORM
HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
ONE HUNDRED SIXTH CONGRESS
SECOND SESSION
__________
MAY 11, 2000
__________
Serial No. 106-203
__________
Printed for the use of the Committee on Government Reform
Available via the World Wide Web: http://www.gpo.gov/congress/house
http://www.house.gov/reform
U.S. GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE
71-177 WASHINGTON : 2001
_______________________________________________________________________
For sale by the Superintendent of Documents, U.S. Government Printing
Office
Internet: bookstore.gpo.gov Phone: (202) 512-1800 Fax: (202) 512-2250
Mail: Stop SSOP, Washington, DC 20402-0001
COMMITTEE ON GOVERNMENT REFORM
DAN BURTON, Indiana, Chairman
BENJAMIN A. GILMAN, New York HENRY A. WAXMAN, California
CONSTANCE A. MORELLA, Maryland TOM LANTOS, California
CHRISTOPHER SHAYS, Connecticut ROBERT E. WISE, Jr., West Virginia
ILEANA ROS-LEHTINEN, Florida MAJOR R. OWENS, New York
JOHN M. McHUGH, New York EDOLPHUS TOWNS, New York
STEPHEN HORN, California PAUL E. KANJORSKI, Pennsylvania
JOHN L. MICA, Florida PATSY T. MINK, Hawaii
THOMAS M. DAVIS, Virginia CAROLYN B. MALONEY, New York
DAVID M. McINTOSH, Indiana ELEANOR HOLMES NORTON, Washington,
MARK E. SOUDER, Indiana DC
JOE SCARBOROUGH, Florida CHAKA FATTAH, Pennsylvania
STEVEN C. LaTOURETTE, Ohio ELIJAH E. CUMMINGS, Maryland
MARSHALL ``MARK'' SANFORD, South DENNIS J. KUCINICH, Ohio
Carolina ROD R. BLAGOJEVICH, Illinois
BOB BARR, Georgia DANNY K. DAVIS, Illinois
DAN MILLER, Florida JOHN F. TIERNEY, Massachusetts
ASA HUTCHINSON, Arkansas JIM TURNER, Texas
LEE TERRY, Nebraska THOMAS H. ALLEN, Maine
JUDY BIGGERT, Illinois HAROLD E. FORD, Jr., Tennessee
GREG WALDEN, Oregon JANICE D. SCHAKOWSKY, Illinois
DOUG OSE, California ------
PAUL RYAN, Wisconsin BERNARD SANDERS, Vermont
HELEN CHENOWETH-HAGE, Idaho (Independent)
DAVID VITTER, Louisiana
Kevin Binger, Staff Director
Daniel R. Moll, Deputy Staff Director
David A. Kass, Deputy Counsel and Parliamentarian
Lisa Smith Arafune, Chief Clerk
Phil Schiliro, Minority Staff Director
Subcommittee on the Census
DAN MILLER, Florida, Chairman
THOMAS M. DAVIS, Virginia CAROLYN B. MALONEY, New York
PAUL RYAN, Wisconsin DANNY K. DAVIS, Illinois
MARK E. SOUDER, Indiana HAROLD E. FORD, Jr., Tennessee
------ ------
Ex Officio
DAN BURTON, Indiana HENRY A. WAXMAN, California
Jane Cobb, Staff Director
Lara Chamberlain, Professional Staff Member
Amy Althoff, Professional Staff Member
Andrew Kavaliunas, Clerk
Michelle Ash, Minority Counsel
C O N T E N T S
----------
Page
Hearing held on May 11, 2000..................................... 1
Statement of:
Mihm, J. Christopher, Associate Director, Federal Management
and Workforce Issues, U.S. General Accounting Office,
accompanied by Robert N. Goldenkoff, Assistant Director,
and Randolph C. Hite, Associate Director, GAO.............. 18
Letters, statements, etc., submitted for the record by:
Davis, Hon. Danny K., a Representative in Congress from the
State of Illinois, prepared statement of................... 13
Maloney, Hon. Carolyn B., a Representative in Congress from
the State of New York:
Letter dated May 3, 2000................................. 46
Memo dated May 11, 2000.................................. 11
Prepared statement of.................................... 6
Mihm, J. Christopher, Associate Director, Federal Management
and Workforce Issues, U.S. General Accounting Office,
prepared statement of...................................... 22
Miller, Hon. Dan, a Representative in Congress from the State
of Florida:
Followup questions and responses......................... 57
Letter dated May 9, 2000................................. 61
Redacted memo............................................ 55
Prepared statement of.................................... 3
OVERSIGHT OF THE 2000 CENSUS: NON-RESPONSE FOLLOW-UP AND OTHER KEY
CONSIDERATION
----------
THURSDAY, MAY 11, 2000
House of Representatives,
Subcommittee on the Census,
Committee on Government Reform,
Washington, DC.
The subcommittee met, pursuant to notice, at 11:20 a.m., in
room 2247, Longworth House Office Building, Hon. Dan Miller
(chairman of the subcommittee) presiding.
Present: Representatives Miller, Ryan, Maloney, Davis, and
Ford.
Staff present: Jane Cobb, staff director; Chip Walker,
deputy staff director; Lara Chamberlain, Michael Miguel, and
Amy Althoff, professional staff members; Andrew Kavaliunas,
clerk; Michelle Ash, minority counsel; David McMillen and Mark
Stephenson, minority professional staff members; and Earley
Green, minority assistant clerk.
Mr. Miller. Good morning. A quorum being present of the
subcommittee, the committee will come to order and we'll begin
with opening statements.
Today we welcome the nonpartisan General Accounting Office.
The GAO is the investigative arm of Congress. As such, it
provides an objective assessment of a wide range of issues of
concern to Congress.
GAO's mission, as stated on its Web site says the
following,
GAO's mission is to help the Congress oversee Federal
programs and operations to assure accountability to the
American people.
GAO's evaluators, auditors, lawyers, economists, public
policy analysts, information technology specialists, and other
multidisciplinary professionals seek to enhance the economy,
efficiency, effectiveness, and credibility of the Federal
Government, both in fact and in the eyes of the American
people.
GAO accomplishes its mission through a variety of
activities including financial audits, program reviews,
investigations, legal support, and policy and program analyses.
GAO is dedicated to good government through its commitment to
its values of accountability, integrity, and reliability.
The nonpartisan GAO has been an invaluable resource to this
subcommittee and our enormously difficult task of overseeing
the almost $7 billion 2000 census.
At this point, I would normally talk about the status of a
range of Census Bureau operations. However, very late
yesterday, my subcommittee became aware of a very serious
matter that cuts to the heart of this census and severely calls
into question the Census Bureau's credibility. The subcommittee
received information that a mid-level Census Bureau manager had
instructed, in an e-mail memo to other Census Bureau managers
under his supervision, to intentionally keep information from
the General Accounting Office.
The memo states in part the following, ``I will try to get
the D-333D report to you all on a daily basis. However, this
report must and can not be shared with any GAO representative.
This is a report that must not be shared with anyone else
except the management staff.''
Let me repeat the relevant part of that paragraph, ``This
report must and can not be shared with any GAO
representative.'' To say I am shocked would be an
understatement. I am appalled. The document in question is an
update on the progress of local census offices during the very
difficult non-response followup phase of the census. The
specifics in this document, while important, are really not at
issue here. The issue is a clear attempt to prevent Congress,
through the GAO, of having access to the information. Is this
the first time, or just the first time the Census Bureau has
gotten caught? I take this obstruction seriously. I take it
personally. This Congress takes it personally.
Director Prewitt on numerous occasions has said this will
be the most transparent census ever. This Congress has been
assured of the level of professionalism and transparency in
which this census would be conducted. This Congress has been
told to trust the Census Bureau. In fact, whenever there was a
suggestion that the Census Bureau would attempt to hide
something from the Congress, it was summarily dismissed. How
could Congress impugn the integrity of the Census Bureau, the
defenders shouted.
I don't for 1 minute believe that this mid-level manager
decided on his own that he would instruct his local census
office managers to withhold information from the GAO. Someone
in a more senior position had to give this mid-level Manager
these instructions. Whether this reaches beyond the regional
census office and back to the Census Bureau headquarters is a
question that must be answered. No stone be left unturned.
There must be full accountability.
While the vast number of Bureau employees are very
professional, there are those, some in very influential
positions, who have their own agenda. These people have no
respect for Congress. They view us elected officials as
meddlesome and they don't respect legitimate oversight. These
people and this attitude are dangerous.
The most politically sensitive part of this census has yet
to begin in earnest. What documents have been, or will be,
hidden from the bright lights of scrutiny? Today there is
reason to be worried; very, very worried. Thank you.
There is a copy of the redacted version of the e-mail memo.
[The prepared statement of Hon. Dan Miller follows:]
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T1177.001
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T1177.002
Mr. Miller. Mrs. Maloney.
Mrs. Maloney. I just would like to put my prepared
statement in the record, I don't even know where my prepared
statement is, and just respond to your accusations.
You know, first of all, we can't even talk to anyone on the
West Coast since it's not yet 9 a.m. there. And I suggest that
we get Director Prewitt here so that we can find out what his
response is before we start making accusations.
I would like to point out that this is edited in your
statement. You add two words. You add ``is'' and ``not.'' And
you quote from this memo but in fact this chairman's statement
contains alterations. And I am asking my staff, and I would
like my staff to hand out redacted copies of this memo and show
that what the chairman is stating is not the entire facts. And
I'd like the memo, before it was edited, to be placed in the
record.
Mr. Miller. It's already in the record.
Mrs. Maloney. And it's not clear what this means. It says,
however, this report must and cannot be shared with any GAO
representative. This is a report that must be shared with
anyone else except the manager staff. So he's talking, I
assume, about the census when you talk about the management
staff. But I think the important thing is to get the area
director here who allegedly wrote this. And we know that area
directors are people who are hired only a year ago. And to have
a few people reporting to them--and how in the world could this
be some type of vast conspiracy to hide information which the
chairman is attempting to put out?
I want to remind everyone that the last time that the GAO
was here, when Christopher Mihm was here, he said that he was
getting more information than he got in 1990. So my suggestion
is that we suspend this hearing and call the director here and
have the response of the individuals so that we know what we're
talking about. You put forward some criticisms that I think
should be answered. And the appropriate information is not here
to have an accurate picture. We should have an accurate
picture. We just got it this morning and we can't even call the
area director because it's not even 9 a.m. in California. So I
move to suspend this hearing until the director is called,
until this afternoon, or however fast he can get over here.
[The prepared statement of Hon. Carolyn B. Maloney
follows:]
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T1177.003
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T1177.004
Mr. Miller. This is a regular scheduled meeting that's been
having full notice since the GAO was mentioned in this. I just
found out about it early last evening. We have a number of
issues we want to talk to GAO about other than this one. So I
don't feel we should be suspending this hearing at this time
but we should proceed to complete this hearing. And we will
certainly be having another hearing where we can discuss this
and certainly we will have a chance to discuss it.
I called Director Prewitt, or we talked earlier this
morning when I--to let him know about this--and we've shared
this document, nonredacted version, with both you and with
Director Prewitt in the Census Bureau. So we'll proceed.
Mr. Ryan.
Mr. Ryan. Mr. Chairman I wasn't planning on an opening
statement but I think I will now. I wanted to hear the
testimony from the witnesses, but you know we invited all these
gentlemen up here to testify, I don't want to waste their time.
I'd like to move forward with the hearing and hear the
testimony.
But let me point to what my colleague from New York was
pointing at in a misleading comment. I'll read this paragraph.
It's very clear there's just a simple typo in this paragraph.
Here is the e-mail message from the mid-level census employee
to the LCO administrators: I will try to get the DS--or the D-
333D report to you on a daily basis. However, this report must
and can not be shared with any GAO representative.
That's the original version. This a report must be shared
with anyone else except for the management and staff. It's a
typo. It says this a report that must be shared with anyone
else except the management staff. All the chairman added into
this was the grammatical correction with the proper grammatical
corrections, which is, this is a report that must not be shared
with anyone else except the management staff.
It's obviously extrodinarily clear from the preceding
sentence what the goal was, what the intent of the e-mail was,
which was, ``However, this report must and can not be shared
with any GAO representative.'' Why this is so alarming is
because Congress is in the midst of overseeing the current
census as it's unfolding right now. We're in the heat of battle
right now. We're in the midst of sending enumerators to
streets.
In my area I'm very concerned about the people who have
P.O. Boxes, didn't get a form, and we have to rely on
enumerators going to their door to collect information from
these people. We have towns throughout rural Wisconsin that
never got a census form, that are hoping an enumerator comes by
to get their census. So I've got some real concerns. I want to
hear from the GAO on these points.
Mrs. Maloney. Will the gentlemen yield for a question? The
gentleman points out what he describes--the chairman's editing
as a typo. When the chairman added ``is,'' this is a report
that must--the way it reads, that must be shared. And the
chairman added ``not.'' Must not be shared.
But my question is this. My question is this. Seriously,
why is not----
Mr. Miller. Have a straight face here.
Mrs. Maloney. I do think this is rather humorous because in
the sentence before, it says, however, this report must and can
not be shared with any GAO representatives. In one case the
chairman adds ``not'' and says it's a typo. I question you why
is the first sentence not a typo and that ``not'' should have
been out of that sentence. So I mean, I think it's very
important that we get the chairman here. I move to suspend this
hearing until we hear from the chairman.
Mr. Ryan. Reclaiming my time. Carolyn, I have the time
right now and I'll reclaim it. There's some other typos in
here. I think the person who wrote this may have to go back for
some grammatical lessons. But I will try to get the D-333D
report to you all on a daily basis. That's not very good
grammar right there. However, this report must and can not be
shared with any GAO representative. That's pretty darn clear.
``This a report that must be shared,'' that's bad grammar.
I think it's extraordinarily reasonable, extraordinarily
reasonable, to assume that the person who wrote that sentence
was intending to say this is a report that must not be shared
with anyone else except the management staff. It's
extraordinarily clear. I think anybody who looks at this can
tell that GAO is being thwarted in their investigation, which
is the auditing arm of Congress to investigate, to examine, to
oversee the census as it is transpiring. That's what the role
in Congress is doing. That's what the whole point of having GAO
is. That's what oversight is, to oversee the census. We're at a
critical time. So I think we should just, here with the GAO,
move on with the hearing. But I agree with my colleague.
Mrs. Maloney. I have heard from the director.
Mr. Ryan. We should have the director here as well.
Mrs. Maloney. I would like to----
Mr. Ryan. I yield back the balance of my time to the
chairman.
Mrs. Maloney. I would like to respond that when you are and
the chairman are alleging some type of conspiracy to hide some
information, all of the information contained in the memo is
available to the GAO. And let me repeat that again: All of the
information is available to the GAO, since the GAO has direct
access to the Census Bureau's computers and management system.
And since we have heard from the director I would like to read
his response into the record and place it in the record.
Mr. Miller. We'll place it in the record and make copies
available. I think we need them.
Mrs. Maloney. I think the director, since you have alleged
concealing information, has the right to have his response read
to the people in this room that are here listening to your
misleading statements.
Mr. Miller. Now, Mrs. Maloney, they're not misleading.
Those are clear facts. But go ahead, I give you permission to
read it.
Mrs. Maloney. This is addressed to the Honorable Dan
Miller, chairman of the Subcommittee on the Census, and it is
carbon copied to myself. And it states it's from director
Kenneth Prewitt:
As per my conversation with you at 9:07 a.m. This morning,
here are the facts:
1. There is no policy that exists at the Census Bureau that
states information should not be given to GAO when requested.
2. On Tuesday evening at about 6 p.m., senior Census Bureau
staff voluntarily faxed to senior GAO staff the check-in
numbers along with workload of housing units completed, number
of Assignment Areas and status of work in those AAs as of
Monday night. No further data were requested by GAO.
3. I bring to your attention that all NonResponse Follow-Up
workload check-out data, and more, exist in our real-time data
base system known as Cost and Progress to which GAO has
complete access.
4. The Census Bureau does not place expectations on lower
and middle management of Field Operations staff to fully
understand our standing policies with respect to oversight and
access and therefore are tasked to not immediately process the
request but to report to upper management when requests for
specific data are made of them.
So I'd like to place this in the record.
Mr. Miller. No objection to putting it in the record.
[The information referred to follows:]
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T1177.005
Mr. Miller. Two months ago we had a hearing that I was very
concerned about access to the information both by the
monitoring board, GAO, Inspector General, and our committee and
staff. It's been a real concern when you receive a memo that
very specifically and explicitly says do not share it with the
GAO. I guess that's not important to you. I think it's a
serious question, a serious problem if they're denying
something to GAO. The data is not important because it
shouldn't be that critical, what I see of the form. But the
fact that someone--this is an area manager who is over a number
of local census offices--would put this in writing, we need to
look into it. Again, I found out about it early yesterday
evening. I was in a markup and I found out about it. So we
bring it up today since GAO was here.
Mr. Davis, do you have an opening statement.
Mr. Davis. Well, I have one. I'll just ask that it be
inserted in the record. But it seems to me that we've had lots
of conversation in the last few weeks about missing e-mails and
things that can't be found and the manufacturing of memos, and
it would just seem clear to me that anything that could be
official would be that which is signed by the Director of the
Census Bureau. It would be that which is communicated in a very
direct manner to the committee, specifying that it's to the
chairman and ranking member. Anything other than that, anything
less than that, I'd call it hearsay. We don't know where it
came from. We don't know whose it is. We don't know if it was
authorized or if it was not authorized. We don't know anything
about it. All we know is that it's something. So I would want
to just take Dr. Prewitt's memo as the official position of the
Bureau.
And also I'd say it's inconceivable to me that any agency
or any department of this government would attempt to hide
something or prevent the Government Accounting Office--I mean
that's--I mean that's like hearsay. Could you imagine that?
Trying to prevent the GAO from having access to some
information? I don't think anybody at any real level would
attempt to do that, Mr. Chairman. So I'll just take Dr.
Prewitt's memorandum as the official position on this matter.
[The prepared statement of Hon. Danny K. Davis follows:]
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T1177.006
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T1177.007
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T1177.008
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T1177.009
Mrs. Maloney. If you could yield to me.
Mr. Davis. I yield to the ranking member.
Mrs. Maloney. I think that it's important that we have
Director Prewitt come and speak for himself. And I agree with
my colleague, Mr. Davis, who expressed his--my sentiments, too,
so well. And let's bring in the person who wrote the memo to
see whether your editing is correct or incorrect. I'm sure they
can edit their own memos and interpret their own memos. The way
you edited it changes the meaning of it.
So I feel that it's important that we hear from Dr.
Prewitt. And I for one would stay over and later on today after
this hearing, or come back tomorrow or Monday, but I think this
needs to be addressed and we need to get the director in to
hear his point of view and the area manager to interpret his
own memo. I'm sure he can edit his own memo.
Mr. Miller. This has been a long-scheduled hearing with the
GAO and we're doing this on a monthly basis. We're going to
proceed with the hearing.
Mrs. Maloney. I'm for proceeding, but let's meet tomorrow
too.
Mr. Miller. We're going to be looking into it when we get
all the information and the people can come to testify. We'll
be having a hearing on clarifying this. But to start trying to,
you know, say all of this is edited, it is very clear this
report says this report must and can not be shared with any GAO
representative. Now, I don't know if you can read it in clear
English or not.
Now, my statement added some grammatical corrections in
brackets. In brackets. And I want to read this again so you can
hear. Listen clearly, Mrs. Maloney. ``However, this report must
and can not be shared with any GAO representative.'' To me,
that's clear English. And I'm reading it directly.
Now, I think we have a serious problem because this
indicates something that's an unofficial hidden agenda. I know
the official statement. And I'm glad that's what the official
statement is and I hope that's the case. But if there's some
hidden agenda that suggests some--is a pervasive problem out
there, because we had a problem a couple months ago and we
thought we had it cleared up. But this is very concerning to me
and it should be very concerning to you because, as Mr. Davis
said, if this is a policy, not sharing with GAO, there is
something that cannot stand.
We'll begin with the hearing. Mr. Mihm, if you would stand,
and if Mr. Goldenkoff and Mr. Hite would please stand, raise
your right hands.
[Witnesses sworn.]
Mr. Miller. Thank you. Please be seated. Let the record
show that Mr. Mihm, Mr. Hite, and Mr. Goldenkoff answered in
the affirmative. Let me officially welcome you. Mr. Mihm,
you've testified a number of times before our committee and
obviously have been working very hard in this and we appreciate
that. Let me just, for everybody's background, Mr. Mihm is
Associate Director for Federal Management and Work Force Issues
at the U.S. General Accounting Office. Since 1993 he has
managed GAO's efforts on the Government Performance and Results
Act, the--and related results oriented management initiatives.
Chris also is responsible for GAO work and public-private
mix issues and the conduct of the 2000 census. He's appeared as
a witness before Congress, congressional committees, on
numerous occasions to discuss Federal management reform issues,
and has been actively involved in working with committees
across Congress to show them how GPRA can be used to improve
congressional decisionmaking.
Prior to assuming his current position, Chris managed GAO's
reviews of the 1990 census that has identified the actions that
the Census Bureau needed to take to have a more accurate and
less costly census in 2000, and reviews the effectiveness of
the Resolution Trust Corp., the Federal agency responsible for
resolving the Nation's savings. We are fortunate to have
somebody that was involved in the 1990 census, since this was
your background and knowledge and we appreciate it. I believe
you have an opening statement.
STATEMENT OF J. CHRISTOPHER MIHM, ASSOCIATE DIRECTOR, FEDERAL
MANAGEMENT AND WORKFORCE ISSUES, U.S. GENERAL ACCOUNTING
OFFICE, ACCOMPANIED BY ROBERT N. GOLDENKOFF, ASSISTANT
DIRECTOR, AND RANDOLPH C. HITE, ASSOCIATE DIRECTOR, GAO
Mr. Mihm. Yes, sir, thank you, Mr. Chairman. And Mr.
Chairman, Mrs. Maloney, Mr. Ryan, Mr. Davis, we are once again
very pleased to be here before you today. I'm fortunate to be
joined as usual by my colleagues, Randy Hite and Robert
Goldenkoff. Overall, the initial Bureau data on the census is
encouraging at this point for nonresponse followup. Major
operations are reportedly proceeding on schedule and generally
performing as planned. Particularly noteworthy, as you covered
with Director Prewitt in the hearing last week, is the 65
percent initial response rate which, in matching the response
rate from the 1990 census, surpassed expectations.
While the overall response rate was very encouraging, the
Bureau was unable to close the gap that has existed between the
questionnaire response rates between the short and the long
forms. As shown in table 2, and this is on page 5 of my written
statement, during the 1990 and 2000 census cycles,
questionnaire response rates were higher for the short form
than for the long form, and this gap has widened over time. The
2000 census 12.5 percentage point differential response rate
was twice that of the 1990 census.
Also shown on page 5 of my statement is that the Bureau
anticipated a 6.2 percentage point differential between the
short form and long forms for 2000. However, the actual
difference was much larger because the response rate to the
short form was higher than anticipated, while the response rate
to the long form was only somewhat lower than anticipated. The
higher-than-expected response rate for the short form suggests
that the Bureau's efforts during the 1990's to boost response
rates by streamlining and simplifying the questionnaires, and
in particular the short form, were largely successful.
Local response rates are important because they determine
staffing requirements as well as the scope and the cost of the
Bureau's field followup operations. As of April 18, the
response rates at the local census offices ranged from 39 to 80
percent, as seen on the board that's on our right over there.
That's also on page 6 of my written statement.
About 69 percent of the local census offices met or
exceeded the Bureau's expected response rates for their type of
office, meaning of course that 31 percent of the local offices
did not achieve their expected response rate. This 31 percent
represents 157 local census offices, generally covering
suburban areas, small- and medium-size cities, towns and/or
rural areas.
Mr. Davis, I regret to note that the lowest mail response
rate, unfortunately, was in Chicago where we traditionally have
had a very difficult time taking the census in recent years.
The Bureau's nonresponse followup workload is about 42
million housing units, which is 4 million fewer housing units
than anticipated due to the high mail response rate. The Bureau
has scheduled about 10 weeks to conduct this followup.
As shown also on the next board on my right, however, you
can see that the Bureau needed, in both the 1980 and 1990
censuses, more time to followup with fewer units. So you can
see in 1980 and 1990 there was a much lower workload on
followup than we have in 1990 and yet much more time was
devoted to followup.
According to a Bureau official, as of May 8 the Bureau had
completed about 17.4 percent of its nonresponse followup
workload, a very promising start. However, it's too early to
tell if this pace will continue. And in doing so--and I think
this is very important--the Bureau needs to ensure that it
collects as complete of data as possible and limits the
inappropriate use of proxy data. This is important because this
is a problem that the Bureau has had in the past, both in 1990
and of course more recently during the 1998 dress rehearsal.
That is, much higher rates of proxy data than was anticipated
or desired by the Bureau.
One factor that is clearly helping in doing followup is
that the Bureau appears to be very well staffed. The Bureau has
hired over 416,000 enumerators as of May 4 and the Bureau hired
many more enumerators than open positions in part in
anticipation of high turnover rates, which during the 1990
census were about in some cases 100 percent.
Within the next few days, data should become available that
will begin to show if turnover is a problem for the 2000 census
as well.
In addition to hiring a sufficient number of enumerators,
officials at most of the local census offices we contacted
believed that they have enough bilingual enumerators to
followup with specific population groups, a key concern in
enumerating traditionally hard-to-count populations.
The Bureau's success in hiring is due in part to its
keeping tabs on the progress of local census offices and taking
quick action where it experienced recruiting problems. As we
noted in our December report to the subcommittee, such
monitoring of the recruiting process and responding rapidly to
any difficulties was a key to addressing the Bureau's staffing
requirements in this very tight labor market. For example, the
Bureau responded to recruiting challenges at local census
offices by increasing wage rates, including, as Director
Prewitt mentioned last week, at the Tampa office.
Since January, the Bureau has increased wage rates at 31
offices and, of these, 11 offices have had their wages
increased since we last appeared before you in April. As we
noted in our earlier work, higher wage rates help make the
Bureau a more competitive employer when it encounters
recruitment difficulties in such areas as seasonal resort
areas.
While hiring, too, appears to be going well, the early
stages of nonresponse followup were not without some
operational challenges. These challenges included a programming
error that caused the omission of surname information from
nonresponse followup address registers as well as several
training and supply glitches.
Let me touch on each of these briefly. First, in regards to
the surname problem, as you know from Director Prewitt last
week, the Bureau discovered that surnames had been
inadvertently omitted from the nonresponse followup registers.
According to the Bureau, this surname information is important
to help enumerators collect data from housing units and
situations where questionnaires may have been misdelivered in
multiunit structures and in rural areas with clustered mail
boxes.
To remedy the omission, the Bureau decided to print
supplementary address listings that contain the surnames which
were then added to the address registers that had already been
produced. Enumerators were then to receive training on how to
most effectively use the surname address list. However, we
found that in 8 of the 12 local offices where we observed
enumerator training, that enumerators' training material did
not include that supplementary surname address listing, and for
most of the offices the trainers were not aware that they were
to receive these listings and provide training on them.
Later, of the 27 offices we contacted following our
observation of training, officials at these offices said
generally said that the Bureau notified them of the surname
problem and they had taken action to inform their enumerators.
Second, in regards to the training, trainers at the 12
offices where we observed training were generally prepared and
used relevant examples of situations that they may encounter
and how to handle those situations. For example, in the Los
Angeles office, the trainers discussed how to handle language
difficulties, uncooperative residents, and potentially
hazardous situations such as vicious dogs. Nevertheless, at
several local census offices, parts of the training were
incomplete and key materials were lacking. My prepared
statement mentions the problem at Las Cruces, NM, where a video
on how to take enumeration was not available.
Perhaps more important is that at 5 of the 12 local census
offices we visited, enumerators did not get a chance to perform
a practice enumeration with actual address registers because
the registers were not ready. As a result, the enumerators
missed an important opportunity to have on-the-job training and
as a group discuss their field work experiences prior to
working on their own.
One factor that will add to the nonresponse workload is the
need to followup on households that are on the Bureau list but
does not receive a census questionnaire from the Postal
Service, an issue that had been a particular concern of Mr.
Ryan. The Bureau mailed out about 99 million questionnaires to
housing units in mail-out/mail-back delivery areas. Of these 99
million, the Postal Service was unable to deliver about 11
million questionnaires. These are known, as you know, as
undeliverable as addressed, more commonly as UAA
questionnaires.
And there were, as my written statement details, a variety
of reasons as to why these UAAs may exist. Preliminary numbers
indicate that of the 11 million UAAs, the Bureau has
successfully redelivered about 1.6 million of these during the
mail-back phase. The remainder are to be included in
nonresponse followup unless the Bureau has other information
that shows that those addresses were not accurate.
Finally, let me briefly mention the status of the Bureau's
data capturing processing. We are pleased to report that as of
April 30, the census was processing questionnaires at a rate
that will meet the Bureau's May 26 deadline for completing the
mail-back questionnaire processing. In addition, the system
development contractor has prepared a master plan and adopted
an appropriate risk-based approach to modifying the hardware
and the software configurations. And furthermore, the
contractor is progressing according to plans.
Important developments remain, however. Many more detailed
supporting plans for those events have not been completed, but
as I noted the Bureau and the contractor are taking appropriate
steps. The key now is for the Bureau and its contractor to
complete the plans and to continue to effectively implement
them.
In summary, at this early stage of nonresponse followup,
the 2000 census appears to be generally on track. However, the
Bureau recognizes that significant challenges lie ahead and as
the Bureau continues its field followup efforts, it will be
important for it to maintain staffing levels, maximize
enumerator productivity, monitor the collection and limit the
inappropriate use of proxy data, and quickly respond to
operational problems.
On behalf of the subcommittee, we will continue to track
the progress, both here in Washington and throughout the
country, that the Bureau and its local census offices are
making in completing nonresponse followup.
Mr. Chairman, Mrs. Maloney, Mr. Davis, Mr. Ford, this
concludes my statement. My colleagues and I would be pleased to
answer any questions you may have.
Mr. Miller. Thank you Mr. Mihm.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Mihm follows:]
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T1177.010
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T1177.011
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T1177.012
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T1177.013
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T1177.014
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T1177.015
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T1177.016
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T1177.017
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T1177.018
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T1177.019
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T1177.020
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T1177.021
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T1177.022
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T1177.023
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T1177.024
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T1177.025
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T1177.026
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T1177.027
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T1177.028
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T1177.029
Mr. Miller. Yesterday, late yesterday, we e-mailed you a
copy of this document. It originated from an area manager and
was directed at a number of local census office managers. Could
you explain what an office manager is and what is the
significance of a memo of this nature coming from someone with
this title?
Mr. Mihm. The area managers are the critical link between
the local census offices, the 511 of those, and the regional
offices that are the permanent structures that the Bureau has
established. These are often, in fact, generally temporary
employees but have been relatively, in the context of the
census, long-term temporary employees. They oversee between
anywhere from half a dozen to as many as a dozen different
local census offices.
And I can tell you from my personal experience in 1990 and
2000 that these are positions of responsibility and authority.
I have seen myself where local census managers appropriately
defer to the judgment and instructions and guidance that they
get from their local--from their area manager. So they are a
key link in the responsibility chain that the Bureau has
established to manage the census.
Mr. Miller. Can you please give me your reaction and
discuss the implications for GAO's efforts to effectively carry
out your mandate to help oversee this census?
Mr. Mihm. As you and Mrs. Maloney mentioned during your
exchange on the opening comments, the actual form that is
referred to here, the D-333D, contains information that we
routinely get access to. For us the more important issue is the
type of message that such a stark statement about ``you must
not'' and ``must and can not be shared with any GAO
representative'' sends. That is not typically something that we
see and certainly do not like to see, and certainly creates an
environment in which--it sends the message that there are areas
that are off limits to discussion with the General Accounting
Office on behalf of the Congress. That is not in our view a
very healthy development and is not something that should be
occurring.
Mr. Miller. Have you shared this document with anyone else
at GAO and are you at liberty to discuss their reaction or how
GAO plans to address this serious issue?
Mr. Mihm. We had--late yesterday after I received this,
we--I discussed it with some of the senior management in GAO,
one of the Assistant Comptrollers General. At the General
Accounting Office this morning, we talked in more detail with
the one of the associate general counsel about this, and they
shared the concern that I had just laid out, that it is a
disturbing statement both in the way it's written and its
starkness.
One of the things that's disturbing about it, Mr. Chairman,
is that there's no context around it. It's not even as though
it may you cannot and must not share this with GAO without
approval or without clearance. Such language would be
acceptable and within the normal bounds of the way we relate
with the Bureau. The message that it sends that is disturbing
for us is again, that there are areas in which it is
inappropriate to be engaging in with the GAO, that we're some
sort of oppositional force that needs to be cornered off.
And notwithstanding the good relationships that we have
with Bureau headquarters and the openness that we have with
them, there is a vast network of temporary employees across the
Nation. Having this message out there is, as I mentioned, is
not a very healthy development, and that was a view that was
shared at the senior levels.
One of the things that I know in communications with your
office late yesterday and even earlier today that they have
asked us to be prepared for is to write to Director Prewitt,
and ask him for any copies of any other memos or instructions
or guidance that may be floating around that would comment in
any way, either in a positive or negative way, about GAO and
its access to individuals and documents.
Mr. Miller. Well, I would like GAO to thoroughly
investigate this matter.
In your tenure of employment at GAO--how long have you been
with GAO?
Mr. Mihm. 17 years.
Mr. Miller. 17 years. Are you--are you aware of any
instances of where a Federal agency has made it their policy to
withhold information from GAO?
Mr. Mihm. In many cases, we have to work through access
issues with agencies. And in my experience in the agencies that
I've dealt with, I have not seen a statement as stark as this.
Mr. Miller. What levels of access to Federal data is GAO
entitled to under the law?
Mr. Mihm. Our enabling legislation is fairly open-ended in
that we, on behalf of the Congress, we can basically follow the
Federal dollar wherever it goes. And so there is very little
that we do not have access to both in terms of individuals and
in terms of actual documents.
Mr. Miller. Two months ago I raised at the hearing, at a
hearing with Director Prewitt, concerns for access to
information. I raised the question, what is he trying to hide?
Because the monitoring board was having problems. We've seen a
memo that was applying to the Inspector General, the--our staff
and you. Now there were some meetings afterwards at the staff
level and things, I thought, were moving in the right
direction. How is your access and how has it been in the past
couple months?
Mr. Mihm. Well, as--let me split that into two ways. First,
in terms of access to routine operational data of the census,
because of--as I've mentioned before, because of your efforts
and the efforts of this subcommittee, we were able to reach an
agreement with the Bureau that gave us access to the computer
systems that Mrs. Maloney mentioned in her statement. And so we
do have access to a wealth of operational information that's
available in the census, including much of the information that
is in the D-333D--I think they need to get a more elegant name
for that form.
In terms of the field operation, it's always a stickier
issue because we are taking people's time there and we are
very, very sensitive to doing what we need to do in order to
provide or assist the Congress in its effective oversight
without being a burden on the census. But we are generally able
to work through any of those issues that we've had with the
Bureau. So there is no outstanding document or request or
individual that we have asked for access and have not gotten
access to.
However, I should add, there are 10, 15 or 20 of us,
depending on how it's counted, that are monitoring the census
on behalf of the Congress, the GAO staff that are monitoring
the census. We are dependent upon people in headquarters and in
the field in being forthcoming with us and not just answering
precisely the question that's being asked but understanding
what the idea or the thought behind the question. We generally
have that relationship with the headquarters--they're very
willing to work through issues with us.
That's a bit of what's disturbing about this memo, is the
notion that there is something that would be out there,
information that would be out there that would be known but not
shared unless we by some chance ask for the very specific
question to give me the D-333D. So that's the essence of why
it's disturbing.
Mr. Miller. Yeah. Obviously it's of concern if there's--I
mean, what the policy out of headquarters is that Dr. Prewitt
talks about is one thing. The concern is, is there some other
hidden agenda--and that's obviously of concern to you. And
someone in an area of management that is a high enough level,
that is pretty serious. You deal with area managers. I'm not
sure this is not one from the local area, but they know who GAO
is.
Mr. Mihm. I'm not sure how much they know how GAO is, but
yes, sir, we do deal with them. When I, for example, when I was
out observing the Bureau's enumeration of the homeless, I was
accompanied by an area manager who was responsible for a number
of LCOs. The LCO manager asked her questions about the
operation and deferred to her judgment. Certainly the
enumerators were asking questions of her while we were out and
deferred to her judgment. As I mentioned, these are positions
of some authority and responsibility. These are not--area
managers--are not inconsequential in the Bureau management
scheme.
Mr. Miller. Well, this memo was just e-mailed yesterday so
we only found out about it hours ago. So I think that you're
going to investigate it, we're going to look into it, of
course, and we want to get Director Prewitt's comments on that.
So with that, you know, this is a very troubling development
and I'm very concerned and we need to get to the bottom of this
issue. So I now want to switch over to some questions about
your report. But let me at this time switch over to Mrs.
Maloney.
Mrs. Maloney. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
It's good to see you again.
Mr. Mihm. Thank you, ma'am.
Mrs. Maloney. When did you, Mr. Mihm, get a copy of this
memo?
Mr. Mihm. Late yesterday.
Mrs. Maloney. Late yesterday you got it.
Mr. Mihm. Yes, ma'am.
Mrs. Maloney. Did you ask census about it or did you
contact them late yesterday? When you say yesterday, about what
time?
Mr. Mihm. Probably around 4 p.m. It was faxed to me so I
can confirm that, but as I recall it was about 4 p.m.
Mrs. Maloney. Did you call the Census Bureau and ask them
about it yesterday?
Mr. Mihm. Not at headquarters; no, ma'am. What we did,
because we were still working on other things, including
getting our statement up here to the committee, one of the
things we did do is at 6 p.m. yesterday I called my colleagues
that were out in the field--and at that time the only census
regions that were still open were out in Seattle and Los
Angeles--and asked them to request copies of the D-333D.
Mrs. Maloney. OK. And did you inform the minority staff?
Mr. Mihm. We talked to----
Mrs. Maloney. Democratic staff.
Mr. Mihm. We talked to the majority staff. And let me go
back also to the earlier question, when I came to the hearing,
I made sure that that census officials that were here had
received a heads-up on this; and in terms of the minority
staff, we had talked to majority staff this morning to make
sure that the minority staff would be notified of this, and
then also talked with some of your staff when they came over
early this morning.
Mrs. Maloney. I would just like to point out to the public
that I was not informed about this incident until 10:15 this
morning. So I didn't hear about this incident until then.
I would like to ask a few questions for the record about
the information in the D-333D form which was attached to the
memo the majority has circulated. It contains information about
the progress of nonresponse followup at some local census
offices; correct?
Mr. Mihm. Yes, ma'am.
Mrs. Maloney. And is this information--is this information
that you would normally have access to?
Mr. Mihm. It's through cost and progress; this is
information that we have access to. It's workload, cases
completed, cases uncompleted, percent done. It's fairly
general; the generic operational status issue. So, yes, we do
have access to this information.
Mrs. Maloney. So you do have access. Access is not denied
to you on any information in the D-333D. So how do you gain
access to this information?
Mr. Mihm. This is through the automated cost and progress
reports that we obtained access to now a couple of months ago,
as a result of the intervention of this subcommittee.
Mrs. Maloney. And you get this information how quickly?
Mr. Mihm. There's always a bit of a lag time. This
information; the D-333D is generated daily out of the regions.
There is a lag between when it comes in, and when it gets into
cost and progress. The lag is generally 3, 4 days in some
cases.
Mrs. Maloney. So you have access. The longest lag time
would be 3 days. Could you get it possibly within 1 day?
Mr. Mihm. It's certainly possible.
Mrs. Maloney. So it's possible that you have access to all
of this information between 1 to 3 days and you have direct
access.
Mr. Mihm. Yes, ma'am. Yes, ma'am.
Mrs. Maloney. OK. I think the facts speak for themselves on
that one.
I would like to place in the record a letter from
controller David Walker.
[The information referred to follows:]
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T1177.030
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T1177.031
Mrs. Maloney. And in it he warns of the disastrous results
for GAO of the 8 percent budget cut contained in the
legislative branch appropriations bill which recently passed
the subcommittee. And I will be sending a letter in opposition
to this cut. And he warns that this is Draconian and that it
would cripple GAO and seriously impair GAO's ability to oversee
the executive branch, and that this is a serious cut. Would you
agree?
Mr. Mihm. Yes, ma'am, and not just because he's the
Comptroller General. I know the status of GAO's budget is
subject to very sensitive negotiations between the top of our
agencies and Members and leadership up here on the Hill. But it
is an issue of some concern for us. We work very hard to
support the Congress in its oversight and decisionmaking
matters. And I know the Comptroller General and all of us feel
very strongly that the Draconian cuts that at least some are
contemplating would cause real damage to our ability to support
the Congress.
Mrs. Maloney. I would conclude by stating that the proposed
cut by the majority will do far more serious harm to GAO's
ability to oversee the census and every other executive branch
than access to the D-333D which allegedly some area manager
said that you should not have access to something that you
already have access to. The D-333D you have access to within a
day, 3 days at the least. So the most serious effort to impair
GAO's ability to look at the census and get the right answers
is the majority's effort, which I hope to be part of a
coalition in a bipartisan way to stop, to cut and hamper your
budget.
Mr. Chairman, I must note that this meeting was delayed by
1 hour due to votes on the floor. I have a bipartisan Women's
Caucus meeting at this point with some of the leadership in
your party, some of the leadership in my party, and I regret
that I have to go to this meeting, and I will be back as soon
as I can. I did not know that we would be delayed for an hour
and I hope you understand.
Mr. Miller. I understand. By the way, I do agree that, you
know, we should not cut GAO to that extent. It's a process that
we go through, this appropriations process. I think by the time
the bill goes to the President, hopefully everybody will be
happy because we--as you recognize, it's a very critical issue.
Mr. Davis.
Mr. Davis. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. Mr. Mihm, as
you've been involved in doing your work in relationship to
looking at the census, are you aware of any instances where you
have attempted to receive data, information from the Census
Bureau, and have not been able to get that?
Mr. Mihm. No, Mr. Davis, our concerns have always been with
the speed in which we're able to get the information. We have
not had in my experience, now going back over a decade, a
situation in which we have asked for something that we need and
the Bureau has said no. Our concern is in getting it in a
timely format that we can support congressional oversight.
Mr. Davis. I know that we've had a great deal of discussion
about the infamous memorandum. But is there any way to
determine who the individual is or was or----
Mr. Mihm. I believe so. In the unredacted version there's
an e-mail address. In discussions that I had with Bureau
officials before this hearing they indicated that they were
aware of the source.
Mr. Davis. So it's going to be fairly easy to find out what
the person had in mind or----
Mr. Mihm. I expect sir, yes.
And following up on the chairman's earlier instructions, we
will be talking to him or her and asking them what was their
intent, what was the source of their anxiety about sharing
something with GAO, what was the source of their instruction,
if they felt they had some, to do that? And are there other
documents or pieces of information out there that that
individual has instructed census officers not to provide to
GAO?
Mr. Davis. You mentioned the discrepancy between return of
the long form versus the short form.
Mr. Mihm. Yes, sir.
Mr. Davis. Has there been any attempt to just sort of
cursorily determine why the difference?
Mr. Mihm. Well, the general difference that we've seen, and
as I alluded to earlier, is that the Bureau worked very hard
throughout the decade, appreciating fully that they would have
a harder time obtaining public cooperation this time, to
streamline the census form and to simplify it. It's a much more
user-friendly document as a result this time around.
They also had the ambitious national ad campaign that we've
discussed before, worked in partnerships with a number of local
governments and other organizations. And so the Bureau was
anticipating a much harder time obtaining public cooperation
this time around. Then, in direct response to your question,
the Bureau did much better on the short form response rate than
they had anticipated and were marginally off on the long form
response rate from what they anticipated, actually just a
couple of percentage points. And so that shows a widening gap
when in reality a lot of that gap is a function of how much
better they did on the short form as opposed to a meltdown on
the long form.
Mr. Davis. Do you anticipate any further delving into
trying to find out if there might be other factors contributing
to the discrepancy?
Mr. Mihm. Yes, sir. As we move forward both in the
intermediate term and in the long term, as we begin to think
about 2010, it is certainly in our minds what Director Prewitt
mentioned at either the last hearing or the hearing before
last, that he does not anticipate having a long form in its
current form in the 2010 census.
We'll be looking at how else can the Nation get that
detailed level of demographic data. The Bureau's preferred
option is American community survey. We'll also more generally
be assessing how the partnership campaign worked, how the ad
campaign worked, and others are doing similar assessments, to
really see if we've turned the corner on public cooperation
with the census.
This census reversed a 3-decade decline in public
cooperation with the census, and that's one of the more
noteworthy stories that has come out of this census.
Mr. Davis. I would hope that we'd be able to look at and
try and determine whether or not some of the public directions
that people were receiving from high-profile officials
suggesting that they might not want to complete the long form,
whether or not that had any impact on the level of response
that we got.
You mentioned Chicago being down.
Mr. Mihm. Yes, sir.
Mr. Davis. How far down?
Mr. Mihm. As I mentioned, I regret to report that they are
at the--the response rate for the Chicago west office was the
lowest in the country, between--which was between 35 and 39
percent.
Let me hasten to add though, Mr. Davis, that even though
that was lower than anticipated, both given the type of office
and historically--and certainly, I know, much, much lower than
the Bureau hoped for--that is, like other census offices up and
running on nonresponse followup, is reporting progress in
addressing their workload, and is making progress toward
completing the census.
Mr. Davis. When we get down to further analysis, do you
know if we're going to be taking into consideration
differential community profiles so that information could be
used in the early planning and that might prevent us from being
in this position? I mean, I take the position that I expected
it to be down in----
Mr. Mihm. Yes, sir.
Mr. Davis [continuing]. Those areas, and especially given
the fact that some of them are some of the most poverty-
stricken areas in the country. And I think that there is a
direct relationship between poverty and how people respond to
some public activity such as filling out forms and that kind of
thing.
Mr. Mihm. Yes, sir. There is a traditional categorization,
called hard-to-enumerate areas, which include certainly the
areas that you're describing where there's severe and long-term
poverty, areas where there may not be a lot of English-speaking
residents, areas where traditional family structures may not
exist, a lot of single-parent families. In addition, a lot of
these factors overlap, of course, in many parts of the country.
The Bureau has a data base on that and had instructed its
local census offices to develop hard-to-enumerate plans. We're
now gathering samples of those plans, going to be reviewing
those and then following up with the Bureau, including in
Chicago, to make sure that the special enumeration procedures
that had been designed and intended for these hard-to-enumerate
areas are executed and executed effectively.
Mr. Davis. Thank you very much Mr. Chairman. I would have
just hoped we could have made use of some of the information
that was given earlier--that is, the Bureau in terms of the
knowledge that some people who have worked with these
communities have generated over the years--when we suggested
that greater use be made of local-based community organizations
to be involved in the process.
Mr. Miller. At another time I would like to find out what
kind of community support you had in Chicago, because I always
thought Chicago had a very proactive--not only the government
spent a lot of money, the city government, but I was hoping
other organizations.
Mr. Mihm. Mr. Chairman, if I could add 10 seconds on that.
The Chicago Sun Times was one of the newspapers that--exactly
on your point, sir--that had been most aggressive in both
promoting the census and in giving census coverage.
So one of the things that we will be doing is going into a
number of communities where these partnerships seem to have
worked, to try and develop a set of best practices as we move
forward to the next census.
Mr. Miller. For Chicago, you mentioned their rate being
low. How did it compare to 1990?
Mr. Mihm. The 1990 rate I don't know.
Mr. Goldenkoff. I don't have that offhand.
Mr. Mihm. We don't have that offhand.
Mr. Miller. Before I call Mr. Ford, I just want to
recognize someone who's with us here today and that's the
cochairman of the Census Monitoring Board, Ken Blackwell. Nice
to have you here, Mr. Blackwell. Appreciate it.
Mr. Ford.
Mr. Ford. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thank our witnesses our
panelists for being here this morning.
I too, Mr. Chairman, am concerned. I don't know if I'm
quite appalled by the e-mail that we've learned about this
morning. I just want to walk back through one more time with
the panelists regarding this, because I want to ensure that you
are receiving all of the information that you request. And I
would even ask the chairman, if he feels free, if he wants to
comment at all, to please feel free.
Do you believe that it may be common with GAO--and I want
to thank you all for all the work that you're doing and the
response rate to the congressional offices and committees
throughout this Congress and I'm one that believes your budget
ought to be raised. I also hope my friends on the other side of
the aisle don't cut the Capitol Police staff as well, and
hopefully we can persuade them or dissuade them of that motion.
But it is your experience and perhaps some of your
colleagues' experience as you believed when they make requests
of these agencies, for perhaps senior level people to actually
have reviewed the materials before they send them to you? Would
that be unusual, for instance, if you in your office, if you
get a request for something and you ask a subordinate to
followup and track down information?
I know, at least in my office, when letters go out I want
to take a look at them before they go out, or any
correspondence from the office. I would probably say to my
staff folks, as I do, You're not allowed to respond for me or
the office until I get a chance to take a look at it. Because
it's my name on the door. I would imagine that probably would
not be uncommon at GAO, nor would it be--nor would you expect
it to be unusual at a local census office.
Mr. Mihm. It's----
Mr. Ford. I'm asking you to speculate, I understand. If we
were in a court of law you wouldn't have to respond.
Mr. Mihm. It's not uncommon. You're quite right. And
especially in regards to the census, where you have a vast
network of temporary employees, for headquarters to want to
take a look at what's given to us before it's delivered over.
And so that's quite common. Randy Hite, my colleague also deals
with dozens and dozens of agencies. So, Randy, I don't know if
you have a perspective as well.
Mr. Hite. I could add one point and that would be it's
tremendously variable across agencies. The notion of having
requests for information reviewed at higher levels in some
agencies like the FBI, for example, that is very, very common.
And our experience in dealing with them is very similar to our
experience in dealing with the Census Bureau. But I could name
probably a dozen agencies where the decisions about whether to
release information to us are made at a lower level. So it's
going to be a reflection of the policy that the institution has
established, the amount of authority that they want to empower
individuals at lower levels to execute in dealing with GAO. So
it's going to vary from organization to organization.
Mr. Ford. I ask this, Mr. Mihm, fully understanding you may
not be able to respond, but do you think it was--that the memo
or the e-mail that we received is, or the contents of it
suggest--or telling those of you at GAO and those of us in this
Congress, because the language used by my chairman is somewhat
strong--do you believe it's an attempt on their part to hide or
conceal information from the GAO?
And I know that the question was asked. It's been asked
already. But I wanted to ask just a little more directly: Is
this an effort or an attempt to--perhaps you see a pattern on
the part of the census of not fully divulging and disclosing
information that the GAO has requested at the behest of this
committee and others here in the Congress?
Mr. Mihm. The second half of your question, sir, is a
little bit easier to answer as to whether or not it's part of a
pattern. As I mentioned, we have not had access problems to the
Bureau which we have not been able to resolve. I mean, this
subcommittee and the chairman have been very helpful in making
sure that we have the access that we need. In terms of whether
or not this is an attempt to deny us access in this particular
case, I can only conclude based on what it says, which is that
we--that it's a report that must not and can not be shared with
the GAO or with any GAO representative.
The concern I was alluding to earlier is the chilling
effect or the broader message that this may send. An area
manager is responsible for several LCOs and for overseeing
several LCOs. And this sends a pretty powerful message that
there are areas that are out of bounds for the General
Accounting Office and areas that you don't talk to the GAO
about. And as I mentioned, Randy and I are amply supported by
colleagues back at GAO, but we're still a small team. So we are
critically reliant on people to be forthcoming with us and not
walling us off or parsing what they say before they talk to us.
If they do, it hampers our ability to support the Congress in
oversight and is just not--it's not a healthy relationship to
have with an agency if that's the way it's operating.
Mr. Ford. I can trust--I would imagine, Mr. Chairman, we're
going do have those before the census here sometime soon to
explain this. I share your concern and desire to get to the
bottom of it. I appreciate your responses, Mr. Mihm.
Can I just ask one or two more questions, Mr. Chairman? I
think I have just a little time left. One of the things I was
concerned about when I was home during our recess recently,
Director Mihm, I had a chance to meet with some of the
enumerators after their--one of their first 2 days out in the
community. And one of the questions was posed to those of us
who had several of the regional directors and other local
directors there and some other elected officials, there are
those that were concerned about their safety because of the
comments that had been made by some of my colleagues here in
this Congress and even some of those running for other offices.
Do you have any reports of hostility or refusals to answer
questions, or doors being slammed in the face of enumerators?
What type of data do you have on that?
Mr. Mihm. We don't have any data on that sir. I talked to a
very senior Census Bureau official about this issue directly
yesterday afternoon and asked him if there was information
suggesting both in a general sense if there was a response
problem because of the attention the census has received this
time around, as well as whether he was seeing particularly an
escalating hostility over what they've experienced in the past.
And he said that the information was not available. There's
always some isolated incidences around the country, but at this
point they appear to be isolated incidences, anecdotes rather
than data.
Mr. Ford. What type of training or other precautions are
there for enumerators who may go into high crime areas, that
you know of?
Mr. Mihm. The Census Bureau has a verbatim training
approach. So the training is the same that's given across the
Nation for areas that are considered to be high crime or areas
where there may be some sensitivity about the safety of
enumerators. They will often do team enumeration. That is,
sending more than one enumerator in. They have also in the
past, and would certainly this time around, have used very
targeted enumeration where they will go in and basically bring
in a very large team of census enumerators and crew leaders and
try to enumerate a particular neighborhood, all together, on
one particular Saturday morning, for example.
So that the Bureau is very, very sensitive and takes steps
to protect the safety of their temporary workers. At the same
time, they realize that you're dealing with millions of
Americans that for one reason or another--in this case, over 40
million households--for one reason or another have already
decided not to respond to the census. So there's always going
to be some episodes of hostility that they run into.
Mr. Ford. The mail response rate was, I guess, roughly 3 or
4 percentage points better than predicted. If I'm not mistaken,
you might have suggested that the estimated costs of
approximately $34 million for each point, which gives us--puts
us at about $140, $136 million savings--and didn't go to one of
the schools in Florida, Mr. Chairman, I can barely add--but I
think about $136 million that can be devoted for other
purposes. As much as I would like to see that money come to my
great State, that the chairman has suggested, I think it's a
good idea that perhaps we use this money for some of the hard-
to-count areas.
And I was curious to know if you thought that that might be
a worthy idea or a noble idea.
Mr. Mihm. Certainly, as Director Prewitt committed in his
discussions with the chairman at the hearing last week, the
Bureau will be using any surplus that may have accrued due to
the higher-than-anticipated mail response rate in large part to
help with the enumeration of hard-to-enumerate areas. He also
cautioned that they have to take a look at how the productivity
assumptions play out to make sure, first, that that surplus
actually exists, and then the size of the surplus. But as we've
reported before, the productivity assumptions were rather
conservative that they used. Overall, the Bureau has committed
to doing exactly what you're suggesting in large measure and we
would endorse that.
Mr. Ford. Just take 1 second, Mr. Chairman. I have some
members from the Tennessee Homebuilders Association who are
sitting back in the back and have been patiently waiting on me.
I want to thank them for taking time out of their schedule to
come over to our committee. This is important to our district,
obviously, and some of the efforts as we look to expand our
economy back home.
And I thank you, Mr. Mihm, and really all of you for being
here today. I can assure you that the capacity of this
committee to get to the bottom of investigations or to
investigate to make sure we get to the bottom of things is
endless almost. So be assured we'll get an answer to this
question for you. We'll get back to you soon.
Mr. Miller. Thank you, Mr. Ford. One of your questions,
your last question, I was agreeing with you. As you know, I
sent a letter to the director that we should program this money
to go to hard-to-count areas in Chicago or wherever.
Mr. Ford. As long as you don't send it to the Florida
football team.
Mr. Miller. I have offered it, since I sit on that
appropriations subcommittee, to help any way we can if we need
to do any reprogramming. Director Prewitt said it wasn't
necessary. I think we are going to save some money; that, as I
said before, we want to do everything we can to count everybody
in this country and especially in those hard-to-count areas. So
I'm glad we have some more flexibility, whether it's more
advertising, hiring more enumerators, whatever possible.
I want to make sure, by the way, that we have officially
included in the record the memo on this, the redacted one that
removes individual names. So, without objection, I'll include
that.
[The information referred to follows:]
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T1177.032
Mr. Miller. I also want to--Mr. Ryan had to leave before
the questions and he had some questions which, as you know, we
will submit questions in the next 2 weeks, but I want to make
sure that I include Mr. Ryan's. He had some concerns about post
office box issues. And so if you would respond to those and
make those part of the official record.
Mr. Mihm. Absolutely.
[The information referred to follows:]
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T1177.033
Mr. Miller. As you say in your testimony and show in the
charts, that despite the better-than-expected mail response
rate, the Census Bureau still is attempting to count more
people in less time during the door-to-door phase than they did
in 1990. Is GAO seeing any evidence of pressure for enumerators
to get out of the field early, and if so, what are the
implications of this?
Mr. Mihm. First in the thesis of your question, sir, as you
can see from the chart, it took the Census Bureau about 14
weeks in 1990 to enumerate 34 million nonresponse households.
They're now planning to do 42 million in about 10 weeks. So
there's a much greater effort that they're expecting this time
around. They have many more people that are hired and on the
ground which is certainly helpful.
The Bureau sets and often attains very ambitious goals for
nonresponse followups, schedule completion. As I mentioned,
within the first 10 days or so, they're at 17 percent
completion rates. And that's a very promising achievement.
The concern, of course, is always to make sure that there's
not a cost that comes along with this. We saw during the dress
rehearsal that the Bureau got out of the field in some
locations on time and other locations actually early. And there
was a bit of a celebration on that. At that point, and in front
of a hearing in the Senate, I cautioned that before we join
that celebration, we needed to see data on proxy. And that is
the extent to which we were getting nonhousehold data. Indeed
it wasn't until much after the fact that we found out that the
studies were showing that the amount of proxy data was much,
much greater than the Bureau had hoped; in some cases double
the 6 percent nonresponse universe of proxy data. That's always
a concern. It was a concern in 1990 when they had high levels
of proxy data.
And it gets back to the point, sir, that you and Mr. Davis
have been raising about hard-to-enumerate areas. West Manhattan
in 1990 had something like a 42 percent proxy rate for their
nonresponse universe. And so basically approaching half of the
nonresponse workload that in one LCO in a hard-to-enumerate
area, that was enumerated using proxy data. Data from 1990 also
shows that African Americans are enumerated at higher rates
using proxy data than White Americans. So this isn't just a
general issue of data quality, the proxy data; it cuts on lines
of the differential undercount and the overall accuracy of the
census.
Mr. Miller. Well, proxy data, they're supposed to make six
attempts, three in phone and three in person, to try to contact
that household. And then they start talking to neighbors or
whatever other source they have. What is an acceptable level?
We've talked about this before but, you know, we're going to be
approving that here in the next month or two. I mean, what are
acceptable levels of proxy data? And at the specific local
census office area.
Mr. Mihm. It's hard to say. I wish I could give you a
definitive answer on that. The Bureau's goal is traditionally
to keep it at or below 6 percent of the nonresponse universe.
Obviously in some or perhaps many offices they reach that.
However, there are more than a few offices in which they do not
reach that in which it balloons up quite significantly above
that 6 percent nonresponse universe.
And as I mentioned, it gets to be a particular concern when
it's in offices that also have the hard-to-enumerate
populations because you just aren't having proxy data but
you're having proxy data disproportionately in areas where
we've had traditionally highest undercounts.
Mr. Miller. Just a couple of questions about money. The
budget predicted the 61 percent mail response rate and follows
along with Mr. Ford's comments. Director Prewitt had said
earlier that they could sustain a lower-than-expected response
rate of, say, 58 or 59 percent without coming back to Congress
for additional funding. With the significantly better-than-
budgeted short form mail response rate and a long form response
rate only 1.8 percent rate lower than expected, do you believe
the Bureau should be able to cope with this shortfall?
Mr. Mihm. There is----
Mr. Miller. Money.
Mr. Mihm. The short answer is yes. Nothing that we've heard
from the Bureau suggests that the incremental amount that they
were off on their anticipated long form mail response rate
causes them undue or severe difficulties. In fact, I think one
of the things that Director Prewitt has pointed out is that at
least some of the surplus from the higher overall mail response
rate may have to go to addressing if they have lower
productivity in the field, because they have more-than-
anticipated long forms to followup on. So it should not be a
telling problem for them.
Mr. Miller. Let me--I was talking with Congresswoman Meek
this morning, and Congresswoman Meek and I introduced
legislation, which we ran into some roadblocks in different
areas, and that was to allow people to work for the Census
Bureau that may need to get waivers. You make a statement in
your report--I was glad to hear that, but would you expand upon
it--in the hard-to-count areas to get people to work for us,
but not affecting their Medicaid or without affecting their
temporary assistance for needy family programs. I see a large
number of States, according to your report, have made, you
know, waivers and such. Would you expand upon that?
And we've talked about it before, but is the ability to
hire people in the hard-to-count areas, whether it's the
language issues or people in some of Mr. Davis' very difficult-
to-count parts, would you expand about the hiring abilities
there and what the States have done?
Mr. Mihm. Yes, sir. Dealing with the second part of the
question first, the ability to hire in each neighborhood is
very important for the Bureau. They've really put a great deal
of effort into that. They recognize that people want to
enumerate in neighborhoods that they're comfortable with and
people want to be enumerated by people that they're comfortable
with.
So it's not a matter that if they're having a recruitment
problem in an inner city area or a suburb that you can just
kind of parachute in a bunch of enumerators from other parts of
the city or area. The Bureau will do that as a very last resort
if they have to. But their clear preference is to get people
from local areas.
As we mentioned in the written statement, the Bureau has
continued to work with State governments in order to get them
to grant exemptions. And since our March 14th testimony there
is--New York, South Carolina, Virginia, Indiana, Kansas,
California, Alaska, Idaho, have all enacted State legislation
providing some sort of relief from State requirements for
people on assistance to work on the census.
Interestingly, also the Bureau data is showing since 1997
over 15,000 welfare-to-work hires have come to work on the
Census Bureau for the census. And so there's a real effort that
the Bureau makes to get people from the local communities. And
as part of that, they have been working very hard, consistent
with the legislation that you and Mrs. Meek have had pushed in
order to get exemptions from any disincentives that may be out
there.
Mr. Miller. So the overall evaluation of hiring enumerators
in the localized hard-to-count areas, how is that going? I
mean, Director Prewitt said it is going well.
Mr. Mihm. Yes, sir. Largely it's going quite well.
Nationally they are front-loaded, and that is, they hired more
people than they actually had positions for. So they're
splitting the positions actually into kind of two different
positions. They have been successful in virtually all areas of
the country.
In the discussions that we've had with local census
managers they are quite comfortable that they are able to get
enumerators and other office staff with the proper language
skills for that. In one area in Chicago, for example, a local
census manager was telling us that there was Lithuanian,
Polish, Hispanic, and Chinese neighborhoods, and were able to
get individuals that could cover all of those neighborhoods. So
they are able to get people with the proper language skills at
this point.
As I mentioned, it is within the next few days that we will
begin to start seeing some of the first turnover data and that
will be critical to telling all of us--and obviously including
the Census Bureau whether turnover is at historically high
rates at some of these hard-to-enumerate areas.
Mr. Miller. I want to enter something else in the record
and then call on Mr. Davis. At last week's hearing, Dr. Prewitt
testified that a Bureau employee mistakenly faxed a document
listing the names and Social Security number of job applicants
to the home of a private citizen instead of another census
office. The private citizen, a constituent of Representative
Tom Coburn, then turned over the document to the Congressman.
It was insinuated in the hearing that Congressman Coburn
might have distributed the document to the media. That was
contrary to my understanding of the events and I stated so at
the time. Since then, Congressman Coburn has written me a
letter detailing exactly what happened.
His letter, addressed to me personally, says, ``I want to
assure you that I have not distributed the document to anyone
in the media. I permitted only one reporter to see any portion
of the document. I was careful to conceal its confidential
contents. The reporter was allowed to merely confirm that the
document was in fact from the Census Bureau.''
I would like to enter this, his entire letter, at this time
into the record. Without objection, it will be entered.
[The information referred to follows:]
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T1177.034
Mr. Miller. Mr. Davis.
Mr. Davis. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. We've
indicated that in spite of there being some areas, especially
inner city hard-to-count areas where the response is less than
expected, there have been others where the response has been
better than expected, and overall it is my understanding that
the response has been better in those areas than expected.
Are you aware of any effort to take a look at the different
experiences, coming from areas that were similar, to look at
what may happen or what might have happened in one that did not
happen in another?
Mr. Mihm. Yes, sir. In fact, we're doing an evaluation of
that right now. We'll be in the field shortly. Looking at a
selection of communities that had much higher-than-anticipated
mail response rates, both higher than anticipated this time
around and also as measured by doing much better than they did
in 1990, the Detroit and surrounding area seems to have done
very well.
One of the things that I should have mentioned earlier is
that one of the interesting stories that's coming out of the
census this time around is that when you look at the expected
mail response rates adjusted by type of office and type of
area, actually the urban areas and the hard-to-enumerate areas
within urban areas did better than expected this time around,
even though in an absolute sense they had lower mail response
rates.
Where the Bureau did not do as well as expected are in some
of the suburban and nondensely populated areas including some
of the more rural areas. And so that's the challenge. I don't
know if, Robert, if you have anything in particular that you
want to add to that.
Mr. Goldenkoff. No.
Mr. Davis. I know that there's the 10-week schedule to
followup on the nonresponse. Are we aware of any conversations
in the planning in the efforts that this might be lengthened in
some of the areas that were experiencing particular difficulty?
Mr. Mihm. Yes, sir. The Census Bureau in both their
operational plans, and Director Prewitt personally to this
subcommittee in other statements that he has made, has
committed that he will not leave the field until he's done in
any particular area. The 10 week is certainly a planning
deadline and that they are doing everything they can to
achieve. But the last time in--the last time being in 1990, in
parts of New York City they did not close out until August.
And, you know, while no one at the Bureau says they anticipate
being in the field in August, if that's what happens I'm quite
certain that they will continue to enumerate as long as they
need to in the field.
Mr. Davis. Do you know if there's a projected cutoff level?
I'm saying if there is any determination that, say, we've
gotten up to an 85 percent response--which is OK, you know--
we've--this is about as well as we're going to do, we've done
everything that we can think of, that we're going to cut here
and move ahead?
Mr. Mihm. There better not be. The closest thing that they
have to your question though, sir, is that the Bureau does have
what they call closeout procedures. Closeout is done not on a
whole office level, it's done on parts of offices as the
enumeration in each area covered by a local office reaches the
95 percent threshold--then they will make one final attempt at
the final 5 percent irrespective of whether or not they've been
to them six times or not. And so they will make one final
attempt and get as complete data as possible. And if they can
get complete data from the household, great; if not, they get
it from proxy. And if they even can't get it from proxy, then
they have algorithms which impute the persons and
characteristics of those persons. But that's the 95 percent
threshold.
Mr. Davis. So communities can be pretty comfortable that at
least up to that point, there's going to be all of these
efforts put forth to try and make sure that that threshold has
in fact been reached.
Mr. Mihm. The Bureau procedures certainly call for them to
do that. And we will certainly continue to be monitoring that
both at the headquarters level and, importantly, all across the
country including sir, Chicago, to make sure that those
procedures are actually followed.
Mr. Davis. Well, I thank you very much. Mr. Chairman, I
also want to just thank you for the position that you've taken
relative to the utilization of unexpended resources in areas
that may in fact have some difficulty in counting. I think
that's the only way to really go in terms of trying to make
sure that across the board we get an accurate, or as accurate
account as we can, from all of the people in this country no
matter what type community they may live in.
Mr. Miller. Thank you. I agree. You know, it's always been
the challenge from day one to make sure we get the undercounted
completely counted.
I have two short questions. Does GAO have a plan to
evaluate performance of the local census office level and, if
so, would you describe the plan and the criteria you would use
to look at performance?
Mr. Mihm. Yes, sir. There's actually a several-pronged
approach that we have. We've been working to develop a list of
local census offices as a subset of the 511 that are those that
are likely to be most challenged in taking the census based on
criteria such as the hard-to-enumerate populations, mail
response rate, progress in recruiting, and now progress in
staffing and possible turnover. We've had a first set of
contacts with 27 of those offices. We anticipate further
contacts. We are certain that we will be making further
contacts with them and will be actually planning to be on
location as these offices get toward the end of nonresponse
followup so we can monitor personally and directly the closeout
procedures that Mr. Davis and I were just discussing.
Separately, what we'll be doing is a sample interview of
LCO managers. We realize the managers are an incredible
resource that's only there for a short time. Once the census is
over these people go away and we've lost the ability to tap
their knowledge about what worked well, what didn't work well,
what are some of their ideas for the next census. These are the
people that have been living, breathing, and dying with the
census over the last few months. So we'll be interviewing a
sample of those managers.
Mr. Miller. Thank you. I hope you all have visited your
local census offices. I'm impressed at my local census office,
the local manager, and the assistant, and seeing their
operations. So if you haven't, I would encourage you to make a
chance just to stop by and visit. I've been impressed. Because
you're right; these are people that are not going to have job
in a few months, at least with the Census Bureau. And I think
they do a very good job.
Let me ask one final question and this is a question I've
asked--a couple Members have asked me--so let me just clarify
it. And that is, that after the deadline for the forms to come
back, they're still coming in. And we talked about it last week
with Director Prewitt. Would you explain to me what happens to
those forms? Because Members are telling me, well, we're having
people say, well, I sent my form in, even though it was late,
and they still insist on asking those questions. So you may
have that same thing. Would you explain that issue?
Mr. Mihm. Yes, sir. The reaction that some of the
constituents are giving to your colleagues is a fortunate by-
product or perhaps or maybe unfortunate by-product of a
fortunate situation. And that is that the mail response to the
census continues to trickle in. I recall just a couple of weeks
ago, or I guess it's less than that, a week or so ago, seeing
the beginnings of a census add on TV and slapping my head going
oh, my gosh, what's this doing now, the mail response form is--
or mail response portion is over--and then hearing the tag line
which was, cooperate with the Census Bureau employee, if you
haven't responded, when they come to your house.
So in other words, the census is continuing to advertise,
they're still up on the air. Now the focus is telling people to
cooperate with the census takers. The effect of that, at least
in part, is that they're still getting census forms mailed in.
So what happens as a result is that these people are too
late to be deleted from the nonresponse workload, so they will
have a census enumerator go to their house. The census
enumerator will explain to them, ``I understand that you said
you've sent in your form, I still need to get a form from
you.''
The reason the Census Bureau requires that is that they
can't be assured that they get every form that's mailed. They
can't be assured that everyone is, to put it delicately,
recalling correctly that they mailed back the form. So they
will still try and enumerate these individuals.
They then have a series of procedures, algorithms, that
they go through to determine the more complete form and the
form that the census will actually accept. When they get an
enumerator form versus the mail-back form, generally it is the
mail-back form they would accept. And after that, it deals with
the more complete form and higher popultion count.
Mr. Miller. Is it not feasible to kind of update their
lists if they get some more in the mail in late April or
something like that?
Mr. Mihm. They did it once. The initial mail response rate,
or I guess the ``preinitial'' or the first cut of the address
list for nonresponse followup, was April 11th, what is now
defined as the initial mail response list was the list on April
18th. That was then sent to local census offices where they
were to have marked through on the enumerators' registers. The
Bureau----
Mr. Miller. It's not feasible to do it anymore.
Mr. Mihm. That has been the Bureau's conclusion. We haven't
looked at it and see if they could do that, sir.
Mr. Davis. Well, it's just interesting, that line of
conversation, because on Saturday of this week, a group of
elected officials and their volunteers are going into the area
that we talked about earlier, simply asking people to cooperate
with the census takers and asking them to be available and be
ready to not close the door, to not freeze them out. And right
now there's a decent level of excitement about it. And we're
looking forward to seek, you know, the extent of the impact
that it will have.
And we've had that kind of cooperation certainly from the
local census people in the area. It hasn't been any difficulty
at all getting information, working with them, and we hope this
is going to generate----
Mr. Mihm. Mr. Davis, if I can suggest that the experience
from 1990 and the experience from here in 2000 already suggests
that those types of messages sent by community leaders,
including elected leaders, ministers, and others, are very,
very powerful. There is no substitute for community leaders
telling people that it's not just appropriate but it's
important to the community to respond to the census. There is
no substitute for that.
Mr. Miller. Anything else Mr. Davis.
Mr. Davis. No.
Mr. Miller. Mr. Ford, do you have anything else?
Mr. Ford. No, Mr. Chairman, I don't have any other
questions. I would only thank the panelists again and can
assure them that I would imagine we're going to ask some folks
to come before us from the census to answer some of these
questions.
Just one last thing, I'm sort of getting explained to me
this chart here. I'm a little confused by the last number, or I
should say the last column there, or the tallest one, the
furthest--the closest to you on the right there. If the 23--or
the 1980 number, the 1990 nonresponse followup, can you just
explain to me why it goes down like that, maybe a little slow.
Mr. Mihm. Why the timing goes down?
Mr. Ford. Right. Right.
Mr. Mihm. The schedule that the Bureau set calls for them
to be able to enumerate these 42 million households in a 10-
week period, where it took them 14 weeks to do this back in
1990. And that's the line that slopes down there. They believe
that they can do this through additional hiring that they're
doing this time around. And the early data certainly suggests
that they've got people on the ground. As I mentioned, they
have 460,000 people that are out there knocking on doors. They
believe that they can do it through better targeting or faster
action in areas where they are having either recruitment
problems, including raising the pay rates, which we have
suggested is important when they have staffing problems. They
believe that they can do it through better and closer
management of local operational problems. All of those are
going to be key in order to making this very ambitious
timeframe.
Mr. Ford. Thank you. And, Mr. Chairman, I yield back
whatever time.
Mr. Miller. Thank you. Thank you again for being here
today. I appreciate it. And you know, we really rely on you
providing that objective nonpartisan information in oversight
on this very critical issue.
I ask unanimous consent that all Members' and witnesses'
written opening statements be included in the record. Without
objection, so ordered.
In case there are additional questions the Members may have
for our witnesses, I ask unanimous consent for the record to
remain open for 2 weeks for Members to submit questions for the
records and that the witnesses submit written answers as soon
as practicable. Without objection so ordered.
Meeting adjourned.
Mr. Mihm. Thank you, sir.
[Whereupon, at 1:05 p.m., the subcommittee was adjourned.]