Hey, y'all want something to worry about that isn't all over the electric teevee machine? Try the fact that the director of the national census just quit because he might not have enough money to do the job in 2020. From The Washington Post:

John H. Thompson, who has served as director since 2013 and worked for the bureau for 27 years before that, will leave June 30, the Commerce Department announced Tuesday. The news, which surprised census experts, follows an April congressional budget allocation for the census that critics say is woefully inadequate. And it comes less than a week after a prickly hearing at which Thompson told lawmakers that cost estimates for a new electronic data collection system had ballooned by nearly 50 percent. "It's like two trains going down the track toward each other, with Republicans decrying the budget overrun and Democrats saying the census has been underfunded," Phil Sparks, co-director of the Census Project, a watchdog organization, said of the May 3 hearing before the House Appropriations subcommittee on commerce, justice and science. "This puts the census in the crosshairs both ways."

U.S. Census Bureau

The crisis here is obvious. This will be the first census since 2010. That census helped produce the congressional districts that produced, in succession, the two worst House majorities in the history of the Republic. In the years since, gerrymandering and voter-suppression has been at high tide out in the states. This all has worked to the benefit of Republican majorities in state legislatures and in the Congress, and now the latter is nickel-and-diming the upcoming census? You'll forgive me if I don't think all this is coincidental.

A former Capitol Hill staffer who is knowledgeable about the census said Congress's mandate for the 2020 Census to cost no more than the 2010 one was unrealistic. "They're not accounting for inflation; they're not accounting for the 30 million more Americans, for the fact that people don't have hard [telephone] lines anymore. And you're going to do the census for the same amount of money? That's not possible."

They do not miss a trick. These really are the fcking mole people.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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