The 2020 census is projected to cost $ 14.2 billion, well below an earlier estimate of $ 15.6 billion, a slowdown in the price of the country’s workforce thanks to technological innovations, according to a new Watchdog report released Monday reflects.
The lower cost came despite the Census Bureau spending an additional $ 1.1 billion responding to the pandemic, the spread of which in the US coincided with the head count of most US citizens in March 2020.
Technological innovations made it possible for most households to answer the census questionnaire online for the first time instead of just by e-mail or telephone, which surprised the statisticians with a self-response rate that exceeded expectations.
According to a report by the Government Accountability Office, the innovations also enabled census takers to record responses from households with mobile devices, which also created the most efficient routes for census takers to get from home.
The cost savings came from opening fewer branch offices of the office and using administrative records to fill in answers for households that did not answer themselves or did not open their doors to censuses looking for answers about their households, the report said.
The per-household cost of the 2020 census was not significantly higher than it was in 2010 – $ 96 per household versus $ 92 per household. In contrast, it had previously skyrocketed from decade to decade, from $ 16 per household in 1970 to $ 80 per household in 2000. At the same time, self-response rates had declined, so census takers had to pay more money to knock the doors of people who had not yet answered the questionnaire, the report says.
“This suggests that despite the spending associated with COVID-19, the Bureau moderated the census’s historically rising cost curve,” the GAO report reads.
The pandemic caused operational delays, forced the office to extend the deadline for ending field operations by several months, and required the purchase of millions of gloves and masks for census takers.
The biggest cost during the 2020 census was actually collecting information from households in the US, which made up more than a third of the budget. Other important items were infrastructure costs such as office space, staff and equipment, which made up about a quarter of the budget, and the price of developing the computer systems, which earlier estimates made about 12% of the budget.
To make answering the questionnaire easier, the office also allowed people to respond without a unique identification number. The office received 17 million responses without the identification number while it was expecting only 9 million, the report said.
The once-a-decade census determines how many Congressional seats and electoral college votes each state receives, as well as the distribution of $ 1.5 trillion in federal spending.
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