. (6/30/2017)

By Allie Yee

The 2020 Census — a once-a-decade effort by the federal government to count every person in the U.S. — is still three years away, but recent developments at the Census Bureau have raised concerns about the accuracy of the upcoming count.

The agency recently received $164 million less than what it requested from Congress in the 2017 fiscal year, despite a traditional jump in funding for critical preparation in the years leading up to the nationwide count. The Trump administration’s proposed 2018 budget doesn’t give it much more. And in May, Census Bureau Director John Thompson announced he would resign at the end of June, leaving a major gap in leadership at a critical time.

Meanwhile, the U.S. Government Accountability Office has put the 2020 Census on its “High Risk List,” as it did the 2000 and 2010 Census, and cited the Bureau’s failure to implement strategies and technologies to cut Census costs, which hit a record $12.3 billion in 2010. “Over the past 3 years, we have made 30 recommendations to help the Bureau design and implement a more cost-effective census for 2020,” the GAO observed; “however, only 6 of them had been fully implemented as of January 2017.”

The GAO also noted the high stakes of an accurate count:

This information is used to apportion the seats of the U.S. House of Representatives; realign the boundaries of the legislative districts of each state; allocate billions of dollars in federal financial assistance; and provide social, demographic, and economic profiles of the nation’s people to guide policy decisions at each level of government.

These developments have critical implications for the future of the South, which is home to significant populations of groups that have historically been undercounted. They include African Americans, Hispanics, low-income households, renters, children under the age of 5 and people facing language barriers.

Census watchers and social justice advocates warn that under-preparation by the Census Bureau now risks undercounting these communities in 2020 — and consequently shortchanging already-vulnerable groups of political power, government funding, civil rights enforcement and other vital resources distributed based on population numbers. That could have far-reaching consequences for the South, according to Erin Hustings, legislative counsel for the NALEO Education Fund, a group that works to increase political participation among Latinos.

“If historically undercounted populations are missed in significant numbers in 2020, that fact will impair the pursuit of greater equity in the South for at least the following decade,” Hustings told

Facing South.