With just weeks before the 2020 census is set to roll out nationwide, the Census Bureau is lagging behind on recruiting temporary workers and addressing IT and cybersecurity risks tied to the first primarily online U.S. count, a new report by the Government Accountability Office warns.
The bureau recently discovered during testing that its main IT system for collecting online census responses was not able to allow enough users to fill out census forms at the same time "without experiencing performance issues," according to the GAO report released to the public on Wednesday during a House Oversight and Reform Committee hearing. Bureau officials have decided to switch to a backup system that they say will allow as many as 600,000 users to respond to the census online simultaneously.
But the government watchdog group's report flags the potential dangers of making last-minute changes to the unprecedented plan to rely on online forms to count most of the 300 million-plus residents of the U.S.
This interactive map shows the population per square mile of every county in the United States. As you can see there are some great differences in county population densities across America. This map uses Jenks Natural Break Optimization of the coloring, which makes some mid-size counties look more populated then they really are. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jenks_natural_breaks_optimization
The annual population growth rate of the United States over the past year continued a decades-long decline, dropping to its lowest level in the past century.
According to newly released estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau, the U.S. population grew by 1,552,022 since 2018, an increase of one-half of one percent.
That rate of growth is slower than during the Great Depression of the 1930s, a period which had until the past decade marked the smallest expansion of the U.S. population since the overall number of inhabitants briefly dropped in 1918
Next month, California will uncork a $187 million campaign to prod its nearly 40 million residents to participate in the 2020 census. Neighborhoods across the state have been computer-ranked by how likely residents are to fill out census forms. Custom marketing campaigns are being focus-grouped. Nonprofit organizations have been showered with grants to boost response in hard-to-count areas.
Texas has a campaign, too — a shoestring campaign. Although the state’s 29 million residents make it second in population only to California, the Texas Legislature has declined to spend any money to see that they are counted. A volunteer corps of civic groups, philanthropies, local governments and others are trying to fill the breach.
Looking to move to a county where there are more women then men? Take a look at this map. Ratio of men to 100 women. For female areas are blue, more red areas are male.
You won't see a citizenship question on the 2020 census. After a more than year-long legal fight, three federal judges are making sure of that by permanently blocking the Trump administration from using next year's head count to ask about the U.S. citizenship status of every person living in every household in the country.
But the Census Bureau, which conducts more than 100 surveys for the federal government, is continuing to ask about citizenship on other forms, which have sparked plenty of confusion around the country.
Unlike the census, these surveys collect responses from only a sample of households, and their results produce anonymized citizenship data that the government has relied on for years to, for example, protect the voting rights of racial minorities. Controversy over the question the Trump administration failed to add to the 2020 census, however, has drawn extra attention to these other citizenship questions.
"The Census Bureau has a long history of protecting the confidentiality of respondents to the census and the American Community Surveys. As part of current confidentiality protection, the Census Bureau “adds noise” to data products in ways they cannot release. The proposed new disclosure avoidance system using differential privacy is purported to be more open and transparent to users. But the new system may come with a significant trade-off in data accuracy, making the public data useless for many applications. We are following this conversation, and we will share relevant information from the Census Bureau and others as it is released."