Brief update from the US Census Bureau on the Status of our 2010 Population and Housing Census

The 2010 United States census was designed to make extensive use of automated field data collection activities, though not the Internet. Due to a combination of circumstances, we have had to scale back our automation activities and re-assign some responsibilities from our automation contractor back to the Census Bureau. In short, a combination of factors worked against full success and we have scaled back our use of hand-held computers equipped with GPS to only using them for our nation-wide update of our address list and maps, commencing in April 2009 and ending in July 2009. We are pleased with progress on our preparations and testing so far; for example, we have had a very successful small-scale operational field test of our hand-held computers in early December 2008. We will hire approximately 140,000 enumerators to walk or drive nearly every street in the country in an attempt to check our list and add any housing units or other living quarters that may have been missed collect GPS coordinates for all structures and update our maps. If you want to check out our hiring web site, see http://www.census.gov/2010censusjobs/. We are still working on our informational web site, with the help of our communications contractor.

We are already beginning to plan for our 2020 Census, having identified four experiments to include in the 2010 Census, and will be working to include an Internet option for our 2020 census.

A new Administration gets ready to take over the Executive Branch of the US government. As of mid-December, we do not know how long it will take to appoint a new Director for the Census Bureau. Until then, the "career" leadership to keep the census train moving forward (it left the station a long time ago).

Back to the main page