Our Awful Situation

Counting people is hard (for the government) to do

Posted by Charlie Kilo on April 4th, 2008

Census Bureau scales back handheld plans, while project costs keep rising:

WASHINGTON — The U.S. Census Bureau’s plan to rely on automation, instead of paper, to conduct much of the 2010 national census is now officially a boondoggle. The agency is facing a cost overrun of up to $3 billion on the census, as well as angry members of Congress who are looking for someone to blame.

And Census Bureau officials are scaling back their automation plans, reducing the 500,000 custom-built handheld devices that the agency is buying from Harris Corp. to little more than bit players in the next census. At the same time, the size of the five-year contract that the Census Bureau signed with Harris in 2006 is more than doubling, from just under $600 million to about $1.3 billion.

The mood was caustic at a hearing on the census held here today by a subcommittee of the House Committee on Appropriations. Subcommittee members received the bad news that the 2010 census may now cost as much as $14.5 billion. And they seemed incredulous about the increase in some cost estimates, such as the ballooning of a $37 million expenditure for an IT help desk to nearly $220 million. Or the addition of $30 million to build a new data center.

So they burned through $600M on technology they won’t use. The result is an additional $3 billion in added expense?

This truly is a government operation!

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Our Awful Situation

Counting people is hard (for the government) to do

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