The next census is being handled by the same administration that brought us healthcare repeal, meaningful tax reform, and the Big Sexy Beautiful Wall. It's obviously destined to be a disaster so epic that Roland Emmerich will make a subpar movie about it. And that's a huge problem, because it turns out something that costs billions of dollars and is literally in one of the opening lines of the U.S. Constitution is kind of a big deal . We need to start caring about the census, because things are looking bad ...

4 There's Less Manpower And Way Less Money

Traditionally, census data is gathered in two ways: forms are mailed to people's homes, and if those don't get a response, a volunteer pays them a visit to get their data. In recent censuses, however, we're seeing a lot fewer people returning their postal forms. The mail-in response rate for the 2010 census, for instance, was only 63 percent. Which means that we're becoming increasingly reliant on house calls. Now, the 2010 census spent a lot of energy recruiting volunteers from vulnerable, underrepresented, and/or marginalized communities to give them an "in" that could result in a more accurate count. But due to massive budget cuts, we're going to have 200,000 fewer volunteers walking the streets for the 2020 census. So each volunteer is going to be dealing with a significantly larger share of the country's demographic of fucking crazy people, and we're also going to be missing huge swathes of the population because there'll be no one to follow up with them.

Michael/Adobe Stock

Continue Reading Below Advertisement

This is a bad thing for a census.

The census, believe it or not, isn't just some tedious government box-ticking exercise. It's incredibly important in deciding how federal funds are distributed among states for things like welfare programs, healthcare, schools, public housing, and infrastructure. Ironically, Congress has been underfunding the Census Bureau itself for the last several years, which has impacted efforts to test and roll out plans for the 2020 census. In 2018, Congress finally gave them a decent budget ... but only enough to provide the "minimum resources needed to prepare for its constitutional mandate." In other words, enough money to do the absolute minimum to ensure that the founding fathers don't rise from their graves and beat Wilbur Ross' ass.

Continue Reading Below Advertisement

It's all sounding pretty grim so far, but good news! There's an online system that's going to solve all of these problems!